


Joust

by tvsn



Series: H+S [1]
Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, by request, honestly? just skip this one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-02-03 07:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12743886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvsn/pseuds/tvsn
Summary: Six boarders plan to break out of school and into a stadium on the other side of the country, hoping to erase the scars left by a long winter (or at least escape them for the weekend.)





	1. Missive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Reinette_de_la_Saintonge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reinette_de_la_Saintonge/gifts).



> I am hesitant to assume this even qualifies as fanfiction as five of the six major players are merely original auxiliary figures in _that fic_ about a senator who goes missing in a dive bar, leaving only evidence of how ugly a small NYC suburb is in his absence (and three are products purely of my imagination ...)  
>  Still, Simcoe is here (…as always) and I could not say no to the lovely [ Reinette de la Saintonge’s ](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Reinette_de_la_Saintonge/pseuds/Reinette_de_la_Saintonge) request for a fic about his school days within the context of H+S. So, here is a gift for someone who I am sure deserves much better. Hopefully though, it will help to pass the time in transit.

Fabienne Bouchard was a liar, and though I had not spoken this sad truth, five pairs of eyes looked at me in horror, excitement and expectation – of what exactly was anyone’s guess. I had personally no idea how to respond an accusation I would have never thought to speak. “Ellie,” I started in the same tone I had taken with my dorm mate since the start of term. She averted her eyes from her target only briefly to shoot me a hard glare. I frowned, and in this, I saw Fabienne’s gaping mouth close into a cruel smile.

“What?” Ellie demanded. I didn’t speak and hoped Fabie would keep her mouth shut as well. She was a liar, but so were we all - Ellie perhaps more than the other seven of us boarders who were crowded into a room built for two as had become our weekly tradition. Every week, Fabienne Bouchard received post from her father and every week she translated it for us whilst we ate the sweets the General sent from southern France. We listened attentively to the stories born from boredom rather than from the short briefs that accompanied the packaged biscuits Fabie falsely claimed to have received ‘from the warfront’. Sometimes, she told us her that father’s legion was active in some former colony none of us could not place on a map, overthrowing a military dictator who had seized power from a democratically elected leader. Sometimes, the general was instead in Afghanistan or Iraq, the antics of his bravery borrowed from American propaganda we were all predisposed to believing in these early days of spring in 2003. Her narrative style often followed whatever structure Miss Fowler was currently in the process of imparting into our general knowledge of the English novel. He was Arnold as told by Austen, Casey by Carroll or Petraeus by Potter, all from the crumb-filled mouth of a girl who had not grown up reading stories in the various styles she thought herself clever in recreating. Language barriers aside, it was clear that this was not _what_ General Bouchard had written or _how_ he would chose to compose a letter around the acronym ‘WMD’ which we had all become accustom to over the past month, but these countless errors that otherwise served as admissions had never before given any of us cause to comment or complain.  On Wednesdays when we received our post, Fabienne was our primary source of entertainment and there was so precious little to be had.

“At least my father loves me,” she now retorted, gesturing to herself as she popped another macaroon into her mouth, staring at Ellie coldly as she chewed. Mary-Ann nudged me to intervene, but like the rest of our lot, I too was shocked into silence.

Ellie forced herself to smile. At eleven, she already possessed the poise and physiognomy of a seasoned politician, which was to say her features were so disconcertingly sharp that she had the unfortunate habit of looking rather like an exaggerated caricature of an MP in one of those cartoons ‘proper’ papers produced and printed for adults. I was yet too young to find them funny and strongly suspected that grownups only laughed to make themselves seem more intelligent. Ellie could name the people who were actually in them when someone showed her such a drawing with the words ‘look, that one is you’. She seemed unaware that we were all subject to that mindless and meaningless critique and that no one truly thought her on ‘the frontbench of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition’ - if that phrase had so much as entered their minds while making the comparison between her face and the ugliest they could find in a newspaper left open on a teacher’s desk beside a cuppa-gone-cold. But Ellie, far from pretty, had more reason than most to keep up with the people she kept finding herself physically compared to. She was likely sick of being told that she would ‘grow into’ whichever facial feature was most offsetting in the Polaroid or photograph that had just been taken. Her surname both exposed the lie for what it was and her less fortunate looks for what they would always be. Eleanor Hewlett was a princess of the blood, and she was the least honest of us all.

“How lovely that your father has time to shower you in affection from whatever desk he sits at. Such a shame that he sent you so horribly far away, his heart must be breaking,” Ellie replied aridly, still smiling at though she meant to sell us all on a tax break paid for by cutting into essential government services.

She had always hated Fabienne.

At first, we all had.

At first, I had taken her anger to be envy as mine had surely been.

Fabienne had a charming accent and the sort of beauty that if one were not born with they might spend the entirety of their youth trying to buy. Tall, thin, icy eyes and snow-white skin, with pin-straight pale-blonde hair that fell to the small of her back, she was conventionally pretty in all of the ways I personally wasn’t and was beginning to fear I would never be. At first, Fabienne had been keen to ignore both Ellie and I as girls like her were bound to, but in the second week of fall term, she had been unseated in orchestra by Ellie’s twin brother Gene. For reasons I had yet to understand but was not in a mind to question, ‘Fabie’ then decided that she wanted to be Ellie’s, and by extension, _my_ best friend. I had been an easy victory, of course. I was nice to people who were nice to me. I tried to be nice even when they weren’t. Ellie said she was too seasoned in siege warfare to capitulate to packaged cakes and boxed pralines.

Her painted smile broadened and I pitied her, wondering what it was like to mistrust tribute, wondering if she had been right to do so all along.

Our school was small, but its social structure complex. As boarders, we were already part of a reality recognised by the rest of the student body as strange. Having no near-by alternative, we regarded the military institution with the familiarity and ease others had the privilege of reserving for home. We laughed during lecture, knew of short cuts and whispered in front of the day-comers about secret passageways that may have once existed and ghosts, which of course, never had. We were all liars, but we shared a truth in that we would all have been outsiders at school had it not doubled as our place of residence. We were eight girls and fifteen boys who became each other’s siblings and primary rivals in the fight for a resource so scarce it was sacred.

We wanted to be loved.

For most of us, an illusion would have been enough.

There were two types of popularity at Duke’s. The first was a modern take on feudalism and owed itself in some fashion or another to divine birthright, a famous name or a combination of face and figure that seemed to have been designed to inspire stories of jealous goddesses and golden apples. The second was more bourgeois than base, purchased though pleasantries people of the true upper echelons ordinarily held no particular stock in. Fabienne Bouchard proved herself in the seldom possession of both the envy and adoration of her classmates. Most of her classmates. Only the Hewletts were indifferent or immune to her charms, but then they could afford to be and perhaps had been made to pay such a price before.

No. For the sake of accuracy, I should offer an amendment. ‘Indifferent’ might well have described Eugene’s attitude toward her and his general disposition towards most of everything else, but in Eleanor’s case ‘cold’ is a more exacting term. The first time Fabienne, who was a year older and infinitely more worldly than either of us, offered us chocolates from the continent and proposed that we sit together with her at supper, she declined. Later in the dorm we two shared thanks to a pleasant accident of the alphabet, Ellie told me in the exact hard language she had just now used that my new idol was ‘ _full of shite_.’ She had then gone on to elaborate upon this expletive, stating that Gene had overheard her arguing with their conductor about second chair, apparently unable to accept his assessment at their comparative skill. ‘ _She is trying to get at him by getting to me and I don’t trust her.’_ Nothing had changed since.

And yet everything had. Ellie had once been honest to a fault.

Out of a boredom that might have been better named ‘sorrow’ or ‘home-sickness’, she now sat with every other girl our school housed and listened to works of fiction as written and recited by her brother’s orchestra rival on evenings such as these. She never ate the food on offer and hardly opened her long, thin lips at all, save the offer a variation on the same lie depending on what she had been asked. “Fabie, your full of shite,” was the first honest iteration I had personally heard from her in months, and where it frightened Mary-Ann and Emma, upset Kate and caused Charlotte and Christina to lean in with anticipation for the fight Ellie had long expected and Fabienne now seemed ready to engage in, I felt elated. I had spent months fretting that last real conversation we might ever have would be the one I had felt myself forced to open shortly before winter break.

We never received calls at school. It was discouraged by the staff and faculty and unwanted by the students. No one ever rang with good news. In my own world, insofar as it extended beyond these walls, this had always rung true.

My father died shortly before I was born, my mother shortly thereafter. Not an hour into my life, I came to own one of the largest media concerns in the United Kingdom. When my aunt broke the story to me as a personal curtesy before it went print, I felt myself called to task. I returned from the headmaster’s office to a room full of wide eyes with news which I ought to have recognised in that moment should have been broken to the twins by someone who shared their illustrious last name.

Without a word to the others, I took them both into the corridor, sat them on a window bank and repeated what I had just been told – their older brother had suffered a massive stroke and might not make it through the night. We all three cried. When the space was then flooded by everyone whose ear had doubtlessly been pressed against the doors to the dining hall, Ellie had answered every expression of sympathy and concern with ‘ _okay_ ’ - something she would later refine into ‘fine’ with a pronoun and the agreeing shortened form of ‘to be’, depending, of course, on what had been asked.

_It’s fine._

_I’m fine._

_He’s fine._

These fibs were all easier to call than Fabienne’s, but still no one bothered. Some lies were easier to swallow than the truths they counterbalanced. For most of us.

“You are right,” Fabienne smiled in return. “All my father wrote here,” she confessed as she held up a letter of typed text in her native tongue, “Is that he misses me and simply can’t wait until Easter. You could go home every weekend if you wanted to. But you don’t, do you? You don’t ask to and you are not invited and so long as we are speaking ‘honestly’ I am not surprised. The stories I tell about Papa aren’t recent. If they were … at least I know my household would notify me if he needed to go to hospital before they notified _the press_. Did Mummy and Daddy ever bother to ring – in your case, did they ever bother _at all_?”

Again all eyes turned to me with the noun by which I was meant. “What the fuck, Fabie?” I shouted. I was not normally one to curse, but I had just learned that there were in fact far worse words than those we darkly identified as having ‘four letters.’

“I told you what she was and what she wanted,” Ellie said calmly.

“Let’s just go,” Kate muttered to her. A few more words were exchanged between the rest of us, some in French, most in the ‘pardon-my’ variety, before we all took Kate’s sage advice. In the hall Miss Fowler, whom we loved and Miss Hemmingsworth, whom we hated had begun to do their evening rounds. They told us all to return to our rooms immediately as had become a near-nightly ritual. Mary-Ann offered an excuse that she had to use the toilettes. She would stay with Charlotte and Emma for the next few nights. On Friday, Miss Fowler would ask her before our double English block if there was something she should know about. Mary-Ann would start crying out of stress and fatigue, an injustice which everyone present took offence to.  The whole school would then soon know that Fabienne Bouchard was a liar (as the Hewlett twins long had) and for a while there after, her charms would be lost to her.

On Friday, I would ask Ellie how she was doing and she would say that she was ‘fine’ and I would believe her for no other reason that I had always trusted that she could be a bit vindictive when the situation spoke to it. The weekend, however, would come with welcome distractions from many of the truths we wished to ignore.

 

* * *

 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, across the quad in the opposite housing block, someone was in the process of adjusting Fabienne’s assessment of her fellow-foreign-border into a more elegant thesis than I rather suspect any of the rest us would have trusted ourselves with at that point.

“Ellie Hewlett is a cunt,” Ban Tarleton announced in frustration to the deaf-mute victim to alphabetical sleeping arrangements, whose name was a mystery to me beyond the fact that it must begin with either an ‘S’ or a ‘T’. “I’m getting right sick of it, I am.”

The roommate gave no sign that he had heard him, continuing to read from his bed whatever he had lain before his eyes. There were rumours about him, as there were and will always be rumours about everyone who hazards a life without an interest in hearsay, without making any efforts to correct misconceptions. Older students said that he had been there for years, held back for reasons largely rooted in derangement, an argument that had precious little to back it. The boy spent much of his free time in the library, and when he was forced out by the hour, he continued to seek company in books rather than in those he boarded with. At supper, he sat alone or with some historical obscurity, unbothered by the regular commotion of attempts to instil mannerisms befitting future officers of the Royal Army in children of an age range set on rebellion.

Charlotte, who was in her final year and already spent one weekend each month doing her reserve duties as per her father’s wishes, had whispered to us one night that all the officers did was fuck and fight and ‘we’ -by which she meant the larger student body- were already meeting a model standard. Danny laughed and asked Mary-Ann and I if we knew of the secret passageways. I told him I thought they were fake. He shot his sweetheart a queer glance and, after sticking out her tongue at him between a toothy smile, Charlotte said that when we were old enough we would find them on our own. In our second semester, we were apparently ‘too young’ to find a door that I suspected might only exist metaphorically.

I looked over at my fellow first-year who had apparently lived here for three as witnessed by a calendar, sitting in the far corner as he gazed into a dog-eared copy of Chaucer. I had heard he was a genius. I had hear he was illiterate. I had heard he _could_ read, but that he struggled with the Latin alphabet, coming from some country with a name suggesting enough oil to warrant and American invasion which Blair would undoubtedly, unwaveringly support – probably with the likes of Charlotte and Danny and their ‘officerial behaviour’ that often took on the form of an extended kiss befitting of a future commission.

Sometimes I saw other students sitting around the boy but I never heard him speak or saw him engage with them in any meaningful way. Sometimes he would move seats to avoid extended company and once he very nearly sat next to me. I felt my heart stop. Cautiously, my eyes darted to the book he had borrowed and the binder he carried with him, trying to make out what he was writing. I had heard he was practicing his letters, that he was good enough now that he could almost write his name. I heard that he was writing all of our names, a hit-list of sorts. Unnaturally tall for my year, but not, I suspect, for his reported age, he certainly looked capable of violent acts. He wore his hair cropped short, and like the proper solider he doubtlessly considered himself (and the right-wing extremist at least half of us considered him) he always dressed in full uniform, going so far as to wear a tie to the dining hall when most boys were content with a blazer.

It did not enter into either version of the nearly identical narratives repeated to me of the Wednesday evening in question, but I would not be surprised if even lying on his bed, the boy wore full dress, apart, perhaps, from a pair of shoes I am sure he would have already polished for the next morning. Sometimes I wondered what he would look like had his interpretation of the proper etiquette of a future officer our teachers and staff were always on about more resembled that of Danny Wessex and his mates. But these were blind fantasies that only seemed to find me when our food was particularly bland and other conversation had died. I had yet to even learn his name. All I knew was that he was stubbornly, decidedly, unlike the others. I knew that he had some interest in history and literature, and that his surname happened fell between Reed and Tarleton, landing him on the left side of a room he was forced to share with a boy who trusted in his opinion of my best friend enough he felt comfortable saying it aloud. 

Ban and Ellie, like Ellie and I, had met one another on multiple occasions before similar strands of parental indifference had found them attending the same institution. His father was the long-serving mayor of some industrial town where hers did business. The two only truly knew one another, however, from the groundkeeper’s work shed where they gathered on Saturdays along with a few other students for whom a trip to a pub in town or to one on the base adjacent to our institution was not yet an option, to listen to radio coverage of the afternoon’s football. When he was not subjecting himself to what I personally thought of as a highly specific sort of torture, Ban seemed to seek out other audio forms of entertainment – things he _could_ , and if history was an indicator likely _would_ \- get in all sorts of trouble for repeating.

But Tarleton was more strategic with his stories than some of our classmates were known to be. He made sure they were true and waited to act.

On this night, however, he had be caught unaware by the landmine he did not realise he had stepped on.  

The most widespread rumour surrounding the eremitic boy in the bed opposite his own was only ever spoken in hushed tones for we all knew the name of at least one of its core players, he whom current circumstance made it wrong to evoke in such ill fashion. Though he varied in other iterations from a moron to a murderer, here he invariably took the form of a shy boy whose father had died somewhere in the developing world. Still shell-shocked from the event, he had stolen away with Edmund Hewlett for two weeks and had been shot at in Glasgow in a street war between rival traffickers before taking off on his own and going down to London to buy a plane ticket to Pakistan. That was when Scotland Yard had gotten involved, according to legend.

And, as it turned out, according to the boys disciplinary record.

Ban had discovered as much the same morning when he had awoken with the splendid idea to start a fire in one of the metal rubbish bins situated outside the entrance with the specific objective of being called into the headmaster’s office to account for his most recent wrongdoing. He had some measure of skill in this enterprise, having spent a fair amount of time surveying for strategic positioning whilst the Major General who now served as our school’s director attempted to get his father on the phone in the small adjacent room containing a landline, a kettle, an ashtray and an open window. It was a fitting setting for Sir to contemplate what must have been poor life decisions, a rather sorry one, as I had come to learn, for students to receive bad news in. Sir had shut the door after shooting his prisoner a hard look. Ban shrugged as he began to smell cigar smoke seeping into the room in spite of the window that was meant to hinder its progression. Deciding that he had about twenty minutes to waste whilst the man who had awoken to light vandalism allowed himself to imagine that his father might care about his means to an end. He set to work finding what he had come for. It did not worry him that he would be caught, or that the details of his earlier misdeeds would ever reach the ears of his father (who would ultimately have to reimburse the school £120 for damages.) The likely outcome of Sir’s efforts that morning would be a quick conversation with an apologetic intern who would not dare to speak to the Mayor of the nation’s fifth-largest metropole about the fully uninteresting contents of a rubbish bin at some school in York.

Ban found and photocopied the evidence he sought and was back in his seat before Sir came back, shaking his head in defeat and telling him to run on.

In the evening, three “Ariite?”s followed his profound assessment of Ellie Hewlett’s general disposition before his relative luck ended. “I know you can talk,” he declared as he climbed atop his roommate, replacing his reading material with the copies he made earlier of the disciplinary report. “What I don’t know if how you managed to pull any of this off,” adding with the bravado of someone who had yet seen his strength tested, “I suggest you tell me.”

For a moment, the lad looked stunned, but his surprise faded into a light smile as he gripped Ban by the throat. Without losing his composure, he forced his attacker to the floor. “How did you obtain this?” he asked, crumbling the report he surely knew all too well in his opposite hand. Ban’s chokes for air soon turned into chokes of laughter.

“Christ, fuck me – that is why. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t – you’ve just taken me by surprise, carry on then,” he said as he fought to regain himself, tears filling his eyes as he tried to silence the involuntary chortles that rose in response to the unexpected and offsetting pitch of the voice his roommate ordinarily made mute.

“Is there something you find amusing?” the boy squeaked in response.

Gesturing to his own throat, Ban answered, “You are just … it makes sense it is not … what I, what anyone rather, imagined. Brilliantly played though. Here I’ve spent the past two years thinking you were absolutely mental. I get it now, I do. I apologise, I don’t mean to-”

“What in the short course of our interaction has you convinced that I am not … mental?”

Ban thought about this for a moment. Unable to arrive at a satisfactory answer, he simply rephrased his original question in response, but his less-bullying approach to employing the boy’s experience in escape-attempts was met with the same indifferent silence of which he had grown accustom.

“Look, if you tell me, I promise I won’t laugh. Your voice it … it just doesn’t match with your face. I think if you gave the lads time to ease into it, it’d be or'rite. Give them a chance to prepare is all. You can’t … go on just _not saying anything_ until puberty is done having its way with you.” For his part, I might note, Ban Tarleton was incapable of silence at that age, which added a certain challenge to the scheme he launched into explaining without giving much note to the slight cock in the boy’s head that would have wordlessly indicated to anyone else that he much begged to differ with this particular assessment of his resolve.

“So I got one of the day comers to bring me for the bus and rail at the weekend,” he started. “The problem is that unless we leave York on Friday afternoon we’ll not make it to Liverpool in time. I’d thought we could take the bus into town with the two hundred or so students with proper homes in the area, but it happens that the only one that services our school goes through the base – which would bring us closer, but we may need to show ID which could prove a problem with clearance. So how did you and ol’ Edmund do it – how did you get all the way up to Glasgow without raising suspicion?”

The boy’s eyes narrowed at the name. “It was over spring break. No one was looking for us. And he had a car. He drove to the train station and we went by rail from there,” he answered almost solemnly. “I hazard to imagine what fantasies fill your mind, but unless I am quite mistaken I have offered you no indication that I have any desire to accompany you on whatever trip you plan to undertake. If you’ll excuse me,” he rose from the floor the short row found him on, returning to the glossy magazine he had abandoned on his bed.

“I’m not asking you to _come_ … I am just asking how you got away with it. I have this … well, Ells. Truly one of the worst people I’m in regular contact with, and she has been this way - oh it is just going on months now, ‘innit? And it is not like she was much better before but at least she was good for a laugh.”

“Her brother nearly died,” the boy responded flatly.

At this Ban frowned and offered up another astute observation in lieu of actual argument, “Yea … but he _didn’t_ and I’m growing weary of everyone carrying on as though he had. Are we just meant to pretend for the rest of our lives that he wasn’t -or isn’t- a pretentious little shite?”

“To clarify … you are planning to kidnap Eleanor Hewlett because it somehow offends your reasoning that people feel bad for her brother? And by way of achieving this you are attempting to appeal to what you suppose are my sympathises? I’m sorry to disappoint you but I have no interest in helping you take a hostage,” he answered, far from swayed.

“Christ you _are_ truly ill. I have no designs on ‘kidnapping’ anyone. I’m going to ask her … once I have it worked out. Listen. There is a derby, weekend after next,” he paused. Unsure, he bean to gesture with his hands, “football, you know um … the sport? It is an ongoing rivalry between two clubs-”

“I’m quite aware what both football and what I assume from geography must be the Merseyside Derby both are. Your point?” He spoke high and haughtily, his brow still knitted in disapproval, privately stuck on the word he had chosen to ascribe to the situation. The document he had been shown spoke of such a kidnapping turned hostage situation. It was not that no one believed him. It was that they had and had still refused to act. Lured away by the same such promises of the sorts of adventures that sound appealing only in youth, the boy had spent two weeks in the back of a van where two men who spoke a language he could not identify called him by a last name that was not his own whilst demanding money from a family he did not belong to.

These detail did not seem to factor with his roommate, whose sole focus hinged on the beginning of the narrative, the dream that existed before reality could reveal it for a lie.

“That _is_ my point,” Ban insisted, “We’ll go, watch it live and then return and things can return to the way they were.”

His voice cracked as he spoke in a way that the boy’s never would, in a way he heard as sorrow. He thought for a moment before saying softly, “I don’t think that the problems the twins are having can be solved quite so simply. With respect, I don’t think you know what it is to lose someone.”

Ban stood up, stretched and said. “With respect, I don’t think you know what it is like to have a big family and yet no family at all. I do. Worse for them though. Neither of their parents called to let them know what had happened, no one did at all until days later leaving the whole mess on Elizabeth Gwiliam’s shoulders to sort, which really was not fair for her either. I don’t really know what is going on up there in Scotland. I don’t think anyone does. I do think it is sad … Gene seems or'rite with it – but then he gets to fly home every weekend, Ells don’t. I don’t think getting away for a weekend will do much to solve her problems, or that I could affect anything to that end – but at least she’d know people _do_ care.”

He had told him he had seen them arguing about it the day before, that she looked to be on the verge of tears but her brother made no move to console her because, as they had all learned, touch only seemed to make things worse. She did not respond to normal attempts to show affection – and if she did, she did not know how to properly reciprocate them. It would be better to take her somewhere to watch blood sport surrounded by people who most assuredly did not share her opinions, because at least there for two hours her peculiarities would not seem out of place. “Isn’t that why you spend so much time in the library?” he asked. “Is that why you are personally set on spending so much time in the headmaster’s office?” came his roommate’s unsympathetic reply.

“I don’t know what you think the world owes you, mate. But forget it. I’ll figure it out on my own. Thanks for nothing, I guess.”

“You can give her this,” the boy replied after a long while, handing him the magazine he had been reading. “There is an article about Jamie Carragher in it. And these,” he said, pulling a few assorted magazines out of his footlocker and walking them three paces across the room. “Maybe they would interest her. You needn’t say it is from me, just, tell her I am sorry. And Banastre? I am sorry. I just can’t help.”

Ban studied the covers of the periodicals for a while. “You don’t have a subscription,” he commented slowly to the boy still standing too close as he looked over the covers. “I’m embarrassed that I have to ask, but what is your given name anyway?”

“John.”

“We are friends now,” Ban said. John nodded, seeming to agree with the assessment of the boy he had strangled earlier in the evening, to my mind, either owing to a blood ritual in which they had taken part, or loneliness which they both likely knew. John slowly returned the smile he was offered, until Ban revealed what was behind his sudden joviality. “But seeing as though you don’t have any other friends, tell me, how did you come by current issues of all of these various publications without knowing a way of sneaking into town?”

 

* * *

 

I spent my Saturday inside as I often did when it rained, inside the studio imagining the colours that nature would reveal when the snow that had overstayed its welcome was at long last washed from the earth. Stained from population it had unceremoniously descended upon, it had not even been white at Christmas, but rather dark from the city soot carried in by the cars of some of our teachers, darker still from the century old chimneys whose fires served merely to add to the filth.

It was coldest in the underground art-room where I had only my colour palate from which to create warmth, but the day had been a success. Ellie kept a number of plants along our shared windowsill which she had been given by the groundskeeper whom she often visited, even on days like this when the rain surely hammered out the sounds of the stadium under the metal roof of the small work shed. She would inquire about horticulture during commercials and the songs the station interrupted the match commentary with every so often to pay its bills and retain their licence to his delight; to her own –and mine - she had been given a number of seeds at the start of last semester which had since sprung to life. I spent many an evening drawing them, filling my sketchbook with colour on the weekends – colour that was invariably richer and more romantic than reality would otherwise allow.

When my watercolours had dried, I turned the page and saw a white the snow outside had never been able to match. I began tracing the indentations left from my pencil insofar as I could see them before breaking away and in the blank spaces I began creating flowers rooted in my imagination. I returned to my brush and time became lost. I had not made it to supper.

When I returned to my dormitory shortly before Misses Fowler and Hemmingsworth were due to make their evening rounds, I found Ellie wearing a mischievous smile that spoke of ill intent. My first thought was that her needless fight with Fabienne had reached a new climax, my second – that she had found one of the secret passages we lied in front of the day comers about but which Danny had insisted existed (where – Charlotte said, would come when we were older.)

Looking at her reading material, however, I supposed it was more likely that the team she liked had won their weekend feature, or, upon closer examination, that she had found something in one of the political publications that spoke to a fantasy I had never known her to nurture. She seemed to have written something. She seemed to have written quite a lot. As she glanced between these words and my face, her smile broadening, I lost the sense of peace I had found in painting. I felt ill at ease.

“What have you been doing?” I asked with some hesitation. Ellie repeated the question back to me, raising her eyebrow in a way that told she had a much better idea of what I had apparently been up to than I myself did. I shrugged, showing her my paint stained overalls, wordlessly confessing that I had been taken up with the same sorry pass-time that I gave myself to whenever chance allowed. “Alone?” She teased, extending the vowel as long as she could as she handed me a note folded into the spine of one of the magazines that littered her bed. Opening it, I saw that it contained a rather pedestrian poem pertaining to me, or to some other short girl with a mess of dark curls, whose eyes, the writer mused, must be as green as the worlds she carried in her moleskin. Would that he could see such beauty if this goddess would gaze upon him in the light.

My eyes were hazel. And I could not decide if I was embarrassed or ill, feeling something in my chest I had never known before.

“Where did you get this?” I asked, genuinely confused at the complimentary content. “From Ban.” The reds that had filled my cheeks must have evaporated in an instant. Ellie laughed again, covering her mouth to as though she hoped her hand would in some way disguise the sound. “Oh it is worse than even that actually. He got it from John. I don’t think discovered the pome before handing it off to me, because if he had not there is a soul in this school who’d’ve failed to commit it to memory by now. You-have-a-secret,” she smiled.

I had a secret admirer. “Which John?” I asked as my mind ticked through a few faces of boys I could imagine him being.

“Simcoe. Whom he dorms with, you know the boy we all thought was a neo Nazi because of the way he wears his hair. Turns out, he is just a ginger. More Goethe than Gestapo too, who knew? We three are going Goodison Park next weekend. I’ll find out more for you then if you’ll cover for me. I mean … if you even want me to. Otherwise I could just talk to him if you don’t want to tell him no and never yourself.” Despite her utter absence of muse-like qualities and characteristics, Ellie was rather experienced in saying no-and-never, waiting, as she was, on ‘a price who would never come’, though, I should note, not in the way the phrase was thrown around the third estate. She would be given in her mid to late twenties to the highest bidder before retreating into obscurity until she gave her lord husband an heir to his line and because she had no further expectations of love would not be disappointed by this fate.

My dreams however were not subject to the restraints of tradition.

“John Simcoe,” I repeated, barely hearing anything else of what was said.

I felt the poem folded into my hand and tried to read it once more as Ellie spoke with excitement over a passion she and I did not share. I smiled at her and nodded periodically with her meter, hearing only the name of the boy whom by the following Sunday I would feel quite certain would one day give his to me before God, everyone I knew and everyone I had yet to meet.

Simcoe.

He hardly spoke but seemed to think quite a lot, and he thought me more interesting than I had ever considered myself. He was somehow under the impression, however, that I would be spending next weekend in the worlds I sought to create with paint whilst, he, someone who evidently knew how to sneak away from this redbrick and soiled snow, planned on going cross-country to visit some ‘grand old lady’ in the company of perhaps the only two people to know that I was object of his secret affections.

“I’m coming with you,” I announced as suddenly as I had thought it, interrupting my roommate mid-sentence.

“Effie … you hate sport,” Ellie said as though this were somehow an obstacle that would stand in the way of her sudden plans and my yet-unrealised romance.

I held up the poem as though it were evidence to the contrary. It felt to me an open ticket and I said as much. I was in love with a boy I had never spoken to, who had admired me from afar for a time so long it now seemed torturous. Ellie said something about the dated ideal that was courtly love which I expanded in earnest. Stuck in a stronghold, I, first handmaiden to a tragic princess would surely accompany my knight-errant to his joust. “Darling, you know I love you, but you are only coming if refrain from talking like … that,” she said, her wince slowly widening back into a smile. It was only then I realised that mine had not faded since the second I learned the name of an admirer I would have never imagined myself as having.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my strict adherence to the modern timeline (as presented mostly through football references scattered throughout my work …) I have had to watch a number of bad and boring games time and again because of the way the schedule just happens to align with other political watermarks and plot points of various narratives. NOT THIS TIME I am pleased to say. This was not planned, and really, could not have been, but the match in question saw Steven Gerrard in the captain’s armband for the first time and gave Wayne Rooney his first start. Crazy, that. And here I assumed (as you I’m sure did as well) that you would not see any ‘history’ in something I’d sit down to write. If you want to indulge your inner child in some classic Prem, here is a highlight reel. But that is still a few days off.
> 
> Jamie Carragher is a former Liverpool* and English NT player.
> 
> Goodison Park, nicknamed The Grand Old Lady, is home to Everton FC.*
> 
> *I am not a fan of either of these clubs … they just, come up a lot. Here, specifically, to offer a ‘clue’ as to how our favourite brooding ginger (and assorted canon company) get off some pretty heavy charges much later and life.
> 
> As I don’t imagine any interest for this by-product of conversation in the comment section of the work from which it stems extends much beyond the amazing writer who requested it, I shall cut the notes off with these few sport references cited, assuming I would just be wasting space annotating various time-specific mentions of politics which are primarily restricted to the War of Terrorism (which was being waged in Afghanistan and had just begun in Iraq around a month before.) The ONE thing in the back text that is purely a self-indulgent anachronism is the mention of ‘Arnold’ being active in this sphere.
> 
> Anyway, hope this was at least in the direction of what you were looking for, Reinette. Thanks for the weird little side project and sorry that I am so impossibly long winded. There is more to come, but then, isn’t there always?


	2. Ladies in Waiting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not yet of an age in which one is given to understanding art and culture with critical distance, three girls brutalized themselves and their company as they individually attempt to cope with the strain of increasingly adult themes and desires.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the comment where the concept of this story was first approached, Reinette stated, _“Apart from their early ventures into crime, I cannot help but think that their complex dynamic, ruthlessness and interest in politics and crime would extend to the classroom. The poor teachers who had to put up with the lot of them...”_ As it happens, I was such a poor teacher who had to deal with this age group in my previous position, and it dawned on me this week in the most unlikely of places exactly what it is that can make teaching them so trying. I want to say that someone “On the Continent” (but I could easily be mistaken) commented of the English National Team after their friendly with Germany that a _“Joe Hart with something to prove is the worst Joe Hart.”_ All respect for the thirty-year old keeper aside, the something to prove bit is so applicable to early teens that this chapter (which has nothing to do with football, mind) centred itself around that sentiment. Tja. Kids can be strenuous in large doses (so here is around ten thousand more words …)
> 
> Before I start though, in keeping with what I suppose are my own inherent character flaws, much of this chapter is reminiscent of the work from which it stems. I don’t know, I kind of feel like anyone else writing a story about boarding school would give you fluff and young-adult fiction, but I have no chill, so here is a H+S style list of potentially upsetting themes: eating disorders, veganism, body image, neglect, isolation, alienation, rejection, privilege, backstabbing, bullying and bad language. Also, be warned, there is a really bad poem … that I fully intend to be read as just that.
> 
> Okay, still with me? I hope you enjoy!

Be it personal or geopolitical, it is natural for people to romanticise the past. Wars are always ‘glorious’, the cause is always ‘just’, and where there is room to find fault with the principal players, that void is invariably filled with the argument that people must be judged against the construct of their time. The only diversion from this rule, or so I have found, applies to reconstructive periods. Perhaps this is because there is little beauty to be found in ruin and rubble. Perhaps it is because the only thing left to us by the historical record is bureaucratic in tone, but I strongly suspect that the real reason no one longs to return to budding stability is that doing so would force us all to face a common truth that would rob the rest of the story from the sentiments we are all too keen to ascribe:

There are no spoils in war.

What is left in the wake of black powder, bayonets and blood is comes with a cost one is rarely in any position to pay. And so the fighting starts anew. And it is always glorious. And the cause is always just.

On the Sunday morning after my first brush with a romance of the sort that can only be found in works we regard as fiction, this reality of war’s spoils seemed especially clear to me. I suddenly found myself determined to disallow fate the chance to revolve around the same small circle indefinitely insofar as I was capable of this feat.

This task, of course, proved impossible.

Fights happened.

They always would.

I suppose they were bound to at an institution that spent a quarter of its curriculum instructing Britain’s youth what was to be done when diplomacy failed, but this, I decided when I saw Fabienne in the dining hall wallowing in her defeat, had gone on long enough. No one gained from her display of humility. At not-yet seven o’clock, Ellie was still upstairs handling the whole matter in high Hewlett-fashion, which was to say that she had all but forgotten that things had risen to conflict or that she had fired the first shot before immediately surrendering a critical position in order to deal her rival a decisive blow. I imagine that attitude partially explained why her dynasty had sustained itself for centuries where so many others had fallen, and, to a larger point, why the same surnames seemed to rotate through Westminster and other houses of parliament on a generational basis. Victory absolved one from any admission of wrongdoing, and no one cared for the small details that separated one war from the next. But I was here on the ground, and as determined as I had been - or at least had considered myself - not to declare for either side, the fighting was done. Fabienne Bouchard was an absolute mess.

In an otherwise empty dining hall, she sought to make herself invisible with headphones and the American edition of Vogue that had accompanied her to school after winter break, which she had already thumbed through half a hundred times, as we all had. Occasionally, she set Sandra Bullock aside to take a bite from the plate in front of her, piled high with eggs, bacon, toast and an assortment of other foods that spoke to the almost conflicting ideas of ‘I don’t care’ and ‘I don’t need to’ – both of which now took a different connotation than they had days before. When she chewed, she frowned, the sound working an awful echo between her covered ears. Fabienne glanced at me quickly before immediately returning her attention to her unconvincing charade.

I let it break my heart.

In some ways, she now reminded me of _him_ \- sheltering herself from a world with which she should find no difficulty interacting. I took another look around the room. No. To my disappointment and elation, John was not there. Not yet. It was just me, Bouchard, and a hyperbolic elephant that I found myself increasingly unable to ignore. Where my thoughts of John - which had proven unrelenting since I had received his attempt at alba - had left me pondering the boundless possibilities of ‘poetic licence’, Fabienne left me with but one option in her unintended emulation of the odd loner I adored. Electing a yoghurt parfait from the buffet, I approached her, sitting down before she had the chance to reply to my rhetoric inquiry to whether or not the spot was taken.

Fabienne seemed surprised by my presence, and I wondered aloud if I had given her reason to be. Yes, I thought she was a bit harsh with Ellie earlier in the week, and yes, she could have been nicer to Mary-Anne and the others afterwards, but I had not meant to give her the impression that I was against her. We were all friends and this would all blow over. Fabienne removed her headphones -which I was not surprised to find were not playing music - opened her mouth as though she wanted to speak, but shut it again, indecisive.

“Trade?” I offered upon eyeing a plate deliciously filled with foods that likely gave her a headache when she heard them rustle between her ears.

She pushed her decidedly English breakfast over to me and smiled. I retuned it in out of habit. I took a bite of a still-warm sausage, gloriously glistening in its own juices which I felt drip down my chin when my pressed lips opened into a grin. Fabienne put her props to the side and offered me the edge of a lacy handkerchief I felt bad about soiling with my sudden lack of grace. It occurred to me that as Ban was attempting to do for Ellie with football for reasons unrelated, I had returned some semblance of normalcy to Fabie in asking for her food. Maybe it reminded her of the macarons she requested from home to share here. Maybe, I considered darkly of myself, I had been unfair in my cultural criticisms or unwilling to acknowledge an inner conflict I was quick to ascribe to Fabienne’s disinterested subjugator. Maybe I had indeed taken sides with Ellie and her considerable faction and this was my victory feast - the taste of over-seasoned minced meat awakening in me a bloodlust I had otherwise felt myself above. Certainly, I reasoned, Talleyrand had been mistaken or misinformed in stating that ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’. Everything - spoils and sorrows alike - tasted better when they had been fried in their own fat. I took another bite, guilt setting in before I had the chance to swallow as I watched Fabienne look over the healthy option of fruit and yoghurt with due distain.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I pushed the plate I had commandeered to the centre of the table between us where it could easily be shared. “It isn’t me you should be telling,” I offered. I forced another smile – this one meant to be reassuring, but Fabienne cast her eyes down at the American actress set to ‘ _Take Manhattan_ ’ presumably with the ‘ _New Clothes, New Hair & a Front-Row Seat_’ the cover of the influential fashion magazine spoke of. I sighed. Stolen sausages aside, this particular victory – if I had played any part in it - did not justify its cost. I rather liked the slightly eccentric exchange student, even when her harmless lies turned into hurtful truths at the slightest critique. I placed my hand atop hers and held it there until she met my eyes.

“I know I just,” she paused, “I don’t know what to say. Ellie _hates_ me, she always has.”

“If Ellie ‘hated’ you she would leave no room for question,” I tried to laugh.

“I don’t. Question that,” Fabienne replied flatly. “She is actively trying to make me miserable.”

At this, I frowned. If Ellie was active in making anyone miserable that morning it was I, and even then, the annoyance only steamed from her light inattention. I had barely been able to close my eyes all throughout the night, and had awoken before the sun because she had been in the process of clicking a flashlight on and off in timed intervals in response to the boys who were doing the same from across the quad. Still, she had apologised when I groaned and promptly ceased – resuming the chat when I elected to get up, quickly shower and find something suitable in my weekend wardrobe, hoping to run into the boy who supplied my night with dreams though his words had robbed it of rest. I glanced around again and found that I was still alone with my cares and questions. John was normally up early, from what little I knew, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“She isn’t though, is she?” I challenged Fabienne softly. “Ellie is up in our room paying some dumb Morse Code game with the lads. She hasn’t said a thing about you since it happened. She is over it. I don’t mean to be harsh, but you are making _yourself_ miserable. Have you tried talking to her?”

“Gene told me in orchestra -” she started. I shook my head.

“No matter what he said, _he said it – not her_. Look, with Ellie … I get it. I do. She isn’t the easiest person at times-”

“I don’t know what to say,” Fabienne insisted again. “I never do. Everything I tried – _everything_ – seems wrong.”

“She doesn’t like the idea that she can be bought,” I reflected as I reached my fork for another bite of British glory. “Try … just being honest with her.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

Fabienne pouted prettily. “You know why I give you all cakes and sweets and tell you stories about my papa?” she asked as she shook her head, causing her messy ponytail to loosen into the beautiful blonde locks I so envied. “Last year, I was so lonely here, I am sure I spent most of my time just crying for home.”

I found myself speechless, able to sympathise though I struggled to comprehend how someone so lovely by nature could be susceptible to the same sort of struggles we all went through upon first arrival, confused as to why this was still affecting her now. I wondered if something had been said between her and Ellie -or anyone else for the matter - some new offence of which I was yet unaware.

Without asking, I pulled her into an embrace as she continued, “I didn’t think it would be so bad, I have had English instruction since I was six, but then I came here, and it was so: everyone could understand me but I struggled with much of what they were saying. Then, as I became a better listener, as I familiarised myself to the various accents and dialects, the time had passed for me to introduce myself properly because of perceived political differences. The things they said, Effie! I had no reply. Nothing I did made it better –and this, it is exactly what last year was like – only now it truly is my fault,” she cried. I held her tighter, hoping my small frame provided enough of a physical presence to provide her the consolation she so clearly required.

“No one hates you Fabie, and certainly not over politics. I know with the Hewletts it is difficult to separate the two-”

“It is not that. It is everything else. Most of the people boarding here and nearly everyone who comes in from the base has a relative in Iraq right now. Whenever my foreign minister speaks, they hear at their breakfast tables that France thinks the war – the sacrifices that their brothers and fathers and families are making – that it is all for naught. And then they come to school and look to me as though I have said these things when I haven’t. So I try to smile and be nice, to tell stories that _are_ true, even if they aren’t _recent_ to show that I understand. And I do. I have seen my father weep when he has been forced to order men into battle he can’t hope to bring home. And I have to act as an ambassador here. For him. For the Legion. For the Republic. No one likes me, not really. But I think they like the kinds of chocolates that are not so much available in York. So maybe, I thought, that might build bridges between us. And it worked. For a while, it really did work. Until Ellie Hewlett came and bloody turned her nose up at everything I have to give! Now everyone else does so in turn. And I hate her. I’m sorry, but I truly _hate_ her. Why does she get so much power? We both said mean things to one another – this is true, I’ll not deny it. But there is a difference. I’ve spent months trying to be kind to her, and she won’t accept, won’t even acknowledge my offer of friendship. And now everyone sides with her?” she gaped. “It isn’t fair. I’m sorry, it simply isn’t.”

Fabienne Bouchard was right; it was not fair. It was not fair that someone so sweet and kind should be made to carry the mountains she needed only to climb. It was unfair of me, as it was unfair of the whole of our student body, to foster such an environment where Fabienne suffered in silence, her struggles unnoticed until it seemed unanimous that they -and she- were better to ignore. It was unfair that she felt unloved – something that was not explicitly true. I was not sure if the moisture on my cheeks came from her tears or my own, but I was certain that everything I had to say on this would be better passed through another pair of foreign lips.

“Tell her that,” I swallowed, handing back her lacy handkerchief and wiping my own face dry with my sleeve. Fabienne apologised at the sight of her mascara on my clothes, rubbing her cheekbones with two fingers, hoping to disguise any similar stains on her face.

“That I hate her?” she asked when she was reasonably assured of an appearance which I saw for the first time was as manufactured as that of any other idol I had ever, and would ever, have. I fought a smile and she fought a laugh.  

“You should tell her whole thing … all of what you just told me. It is hard to believe, I know, but Ellie would understand more than you think. I think you would understand her too, if you … I mean,” I paused, considering all of what I had heard, considering that their disagreements might be at least partially language-based. “She has one of the more difficult accents our island has on offer -”

“Not really,” Fabienne interrupted. “Not for me. My father used to live in Glasgow.”

“Um,” I frowned. My friend did not have the best track record and I was not sure if this too was an exaggeration or mistruth. Perhaps he had been there on a weekend holiday. Or ordered a bottle of Tennant’s in a bar somewhere on the continent that had a standard selection of ‘international’ beer. Or had been forced to make haggis in Dakar when his unit had been cut off from their supply chain by a group of insurgents they were trying to suppress and had only a bullet ridden sheep carcass to feed a hundred men. Or however she would ordinarily choose to explain her claim to proficiency. I waited.

“A long time ago. Before I was born.”

I missed the macaroons and melodrama.

“Then maybe you know … a bit of what you are dealing with,” I tried to say diplomatically. “You are right, kind of. Ellie doesn’t eat the food you offer her because of politics - not hers, not yours, and certainly not France’s. I don’t think she actually has any particular affection for animals herself, which is why she never mentions this like the rest of the movement, but she is a strict vegan. Her father is  one too, and was one first, because it impresses some people in some of the circles he travels and I think … well, I think that Ellie denies herself most things hoping that her dad will talk to her again someday.” This was speculation, and truth be told I had a few other suspicions about Ellie’s diet that I did not want to voice to someone who had just admitted to hating her. Still, there was some validity to my claim, more so than much of what went said at our school. Ellie never talked about her home life or lack thereof for the same reasons no one ever complained about their parents or siblings in front of me. Still, we roomed together, and having owned a substantial part of her father’s business since birth, I had known her all my life and had knew as such a few things about life in large families which I did not find particularly enviable, even given my orphan status. “Can you keep a secret?” I asked.

“Who would I tell?” Fabienne shrugged.

“A couple of years ago, the Hewletts were rumoured to be going through financial hardship,” I whispered, though there was no one present who might overhear. “I can’t speak to whether any of this was ultimately true or not, and I fear I should not even know this much – and I certainly ought not repeat it, but there was … this big fight in their family. Mostly, at first, between her father and elder brother – the one who nearly died this past winter - but in the end, it wound up involving everyone. Ellie’s father sent her –and only her - to live with her lord uncle in Edinburgh. She begged him not to send her away but ultimately… well he gave her no say and the two have not spoken since. I think … she is more of a princess now, more reserved because I guess you learn behaviour like that in castles that house actual representatives of state than you do in largely empty country estates. Here, most people treat her with a kind of deference because of her last name and Ellie just has this knee jerk reaction to the whole pomp and ceremony of it. It can be brutal,” I admitted, “and understand, I am in no way defending it,” I pivoted, “but there are some tricks, um … she has some weird ticks. Okay, you won’t repeat this either?”

“No.”

“Ban Tarleton straight called her a cunt yesterday and now they are getting on famously again.”

Fabienne’s pale eyes widened.

“It isn’t … untrue exactly. I mean I get why someone would say that but … the crazy thing is she is actually _smiling_ now. She is honest, even friendly, with people she knows she can trust to be honest with her. It is just a hard shell to break.”

Fabie bit her lower lip as though she meant to object. She did not. “I didn’t know that things between her and her father were that bad,” she said softly after a moment. “Or bad at all. I don’t know why I said it. I wanted her to like me and she wouldn’t and – oh god, I can’t say that word though. Not to her. Not even behind her back. Bitch … maybe. Princess defiantly,” she exhaled, adding quickly, “in every possible connotation.”

I realized I had given a poor example.

“Pretty sure Ban is the only person who could or would even come on a word like that. He might be the only person who could get away with it too, for that matter,” I cautioned. “I really think that if you just explain how much harder she is making things between you and other students she would come ‘on side’,” I said, borrowing from a terminology that I had familiarised myself with over the course of the night prior.

“Are they …? I saw him earlier. Ban. With that one kid who can’t talk. He was in rather high spirits.”

I considered the possibility of a Biblical End of Times as Fabienne tried to open a question which she was rightly hesitant to put to words, but by the time she had come to ‘that one kid’ I had all but forgotten Ban, Ellie, and every other name I had ever known, including hers and my own.

“John?” I asked leaning forward in my seat.

“No. Yes?” she squinted, “You know, the one who doesn’t know any English? He was here. He seemed relatively upbeat, too … when judged against a personal average I suppose? They took fruit. And left.”

“His name is John Graves Simcoe,” I smiled. I sank. “He was here already?”

“He always gets up fairly early and never stays for long. Why?”

“I was hoping I might,” I started, “I don’t know. I want to talk to him. And I don’t. I don’t know what to say which is strange because he is most of what I think about.”

Fabienne squeezed my hands together in hers and, after a few exclamations in a language that sounded Slavic to my untrained ear, confessed in the same pained tones that had painted her telling of her current life as a quasi-diplomat in a cold court, “I know how you feel. I know exactly what that is like.”

“You do?” She couldn’t. I believed at that age - as everyone else to ever pour through the pages of a fashion magazine with a slightly older target audience invariably will - that if only I had long legs and platinum hair as Fabienne did, I would be about to do and say anything and the boys would all love me. My actions, whatever form they took, would only add to my physical attributes. My life would be prefect, because ‘perfection’ had been defined for me by media as having features nature had not endowed. In hindsight, this seems ridiculous. Even in the moment, it seemed silly to me that I should be so jealous of someone who had spent the past several days crying from loneliness, though, it shames me to say, not for reasons of basic logic or compassion. I saw that under her foundation, Fabienne’s skin was not much better than that of everyone else in her year; in fact, it seemed considerably worse. That might have been a result of her recent war with Ellie, I reasoned. My best friend could frighten anyone if she found some benefit in misbehaviour, but where Ellie could put up a decent display of force in most conflicts, Love, I believed, was all-conquering. Spots aside, Fabie was well-equipped to hold her own in the fight we all stood to lose. Better than I felt myself, at any rate.

“It is hell, Effie. It is hell!” she declared, more assured than I had ever known her to be. I was taken aback, my slight envy subsided. The first assumption I had was that she had known heart-break far more intimately than she had ever known a boy, or perhaps it was the other way around – that there was someone back in France whom she loved dearly, and separation only serve to amplify her feelings of isolation. As she tightened her grip on my hands, I considered that even in the absence of struggle - both real and perceived - Fabienne Bouchard was simply given to histrionic behaviour, but then could that not be said of every girl of thirteen? Was I not the same when it came to my mysterious minnesinger?

“He wrote me a poem, John,” I smiled, as I often seemed to when I allowed myself the joy of speaking his name. “Or, he wrote a poem about me, stuck it in a magazine which he had Ban give to Ellie which she then put into my hands.”

“A poem?” Fabienne squealed, releasing my hands that hers might cover a particularly girlish grin I had seen Ellie wear the night prior. “He has written you a poem? This boy?” She rephrased the question several times without giving my room to answer, each incarnation amplifying her excitement and with it, her accent. Finally, she asked if she could see it and I handed her the piece of folded notebook paper from which I was pained to part. Fabienne read it once with her eyes and once with her lips, blending the colours of her diphthong-rich-dialect with those John saw in my landscapes and imagined in my eyes.

_“Could you pardon my asking,_

_Would you spare me a glance,_

_For I’ve spent my days staring_

_Lost in this trance._

_I wander your paintings,_

_Your colours that rob,_

_This world of its anguish,_

_Of its austere and macabre,_

_Oh, chestnut haired goddess,_

_Would you turn that I may face,_

_You in all of your splendour,_

_Your skill and your grace?_

_I wander your paintings,_

_I am looking for you,_

_Are your eyes as green as your foliage,_

_Are they brown? Are they blue?_

_I wander your paintings,_

_Your watercolour worlds,_

_Longing to glimpse the eyes of the girl,_

_For whom there is beauty,_

_In things normally bleak,_

_How would you see me?_

_What would you think?”_

Fabienne clapped when she was through, either at the words or her performance of them. She reached over, tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear and looking into my eyes with the sort of intensity I associated with trouble. She repeated the last two lines to me, alternating the tense and pronoun accordingly. I was as abstracted in John’s words as he was in the watercolours I had done of scenery around our school. I was so lost, it seemed, that I could not find words of my own with which to meet his.

I had spent nearly the night in what seemed its entirety pondering not only his message but also his method of delivery. The poem itself was mediocre if one were being generous, but he had chosen to praise me, or rather, to praise something which I took great pride in a way that showed he thought critically about what I was trying to convey in my work which he then approached it with his own equally armature skill. Fabienne was as enamoured as I myself was with his efforts, but somehow I doubted the same could have been said of Ban, for whom everything was fodder, or Ellie, whom nothing impressed. Yet finding that he had afforded himself few other options, he had chosen to go through this channel to tell me how he felt, and had done so in a manner that would surely subject him to further mockery were it discovered. John Graves Simcoe was exceptional brave. And yet he was a coward. But then, so was I.

“I … I don’t know what I can offer in response,” I confessed. “Ellie said that Ban told her that John doesn’t speak because there is something … off about his voice somehow, and I find it so, so sad because I’ve _seen_ it, his voice, I’ve _heard_ it in what he wrote me – and I think it beautiful, no matter what it sounds like. What should I say? What would _you_ say?”

Fabienne’s joy faded. “I don’t know if I can be of any help, much as I would love to. I have never had a boyfriend. Euh … there is this boy who I like … even love, but he doesn’t … reciprocate. I am but certain he never shall,” she said quietly, her eyes glancing down at the poem as she softly traced the words with her index finger.

“Fabie are you crazy?” I exclaimed. “You are smart and talented and so unbelievably beautiful. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but you are one of the most popular girls at school. All the lads would be falling over themselves if they but knew -”

“I wrote him a letter once. No, I am lying to you,” she swallowed. “I wrote him more than a few letters. Many letters. Once I saw him half smile and put it away in his bag. I had asked him to meet me but he didn’t show up. Or he came, saw it was me and left without a word. He doesn’t like me and he never will now. Never!”

“Because of de Villepin?” I puzzled, remembering the recent comments the French foreign minister made about the war in which most of the student body either had a relative, or would soon find themselves engaged in. The way she spoke, he must have been a classmate, perhaps one who had taken to calling crisps ‘freedom fries’ as the Americans had, causing Fabie offence and offering her an option of defeat in a battle she could easily win under other circumstances. This, I thought, rather than foreign and defence policy, must be why the public accused the French of cowardice. I did not want to fire more shots in a conflict I hoped would soon be resolved, but I saw no option but to invoke her own exaggerated ideas of the general. “ _Fabienne Bouchard_!” I hissed, “ _You can’t just give up. What would your father think_?”

“This fight I’m having with Ellie … it is just not going to get better, is it? You are the only person I can talk to and the only advice you have for me about how to make things right with her is that she responds better to curses than chocolates and I know – _I know_ \- that at least in my case that would only make things worse.”

“Wait,” I winced, wondering if this was why she had begun to inquire at the possibility of her rival’s romantic entanglements. “You don’t mean. Oh, Fabie … Ban and Ellie aren’t going out. I am pretty sure that the whole of their friendship - if you even want to call it that - is based on mutually disliking one another’s football clubs.”

“You are not serious.”

“I am,” I assured her.

“Effie,” she begged.

I took a deep breath. “I would support you no matter what - hopefully you know that, and it is not that I don’t see it.  I mean, I suppose he is attractive on a level that almost boarders ridiculous and I’ll admit he has his moments of genius … um, for what they are worth, but … I – I am just suggesting that maybe the reason you like him is because you haven’t spoken to him? Maybe? I don’t think Ban is quite mature enough -”

“Effie,” she interrupted, “I asked if they were going together because he looked really happy this morning, not because - Ew! No. It is not him. It is worse. A bit. Much. It is much worse, or rather, I have made things much worse. Promise you won’t be cross with me?”

“On my life,” I lied, in my head repeating a plea over and over until it because a prayer in all of its fervour. Please, I thought. Anyone, _anyone_ but John.

Fabienne looked down at the poem and then back to me. She started, hesitant to speak. I grabbed back my missive from her, feeling sorry, jealous, angry and embarrassed all at once. “Please,” I begged, “Anyone but John.”

“It isn’t,” she squinted. Relieved, I node for her to continue.

“You remember … the beginning of last semester when we became friends how I had just been unseated in orchestra and Ellie thought that was why I was suddenly so insistent that we all dine together? Well, she was right but she wasn’t. Eugene wouldn’t and still won’t talk to me on his own accord and I - I freeze up every time I even have the chance to talk to him. I saw he was always around his sister so I thought maybe, if we could become friends, maybe he would look at me differently, which is to say, that I hoped he would look at me, full stop.”

I wondered if she had ever really looked at _him_. Put delicately, Eugene Hewlett’s most attractive quality might just have been his complete disinterest in engaging with beauty as an ideal. He wore bespoke suits as every man in his line did, but in his case, it was not due to what I would have otherwise considered a genetic compulsion to set a certain impression, but rather because nothing off the rack for a lad of his height could accommodate his relative circumference. Sometimes, people thought to announce to him in the mocking tones children used when they saw something that did not conform to the mental image born from a weakness of fantasy or borrowed from film and television targeted at our age group that he was overweight, and he responded with dramatic surprise that they presumed this had somehow escaped him. When we first started school, I myself had said something more gently to him when I saw him devouring a plate like the one between Fabienne and I, to which he said that he did not have a weight problem, other people, myself included, had a problem with his weight. He did not let this trouble him and in fact found it all rather amusing. I could pretend he was going through a growth spurt if it made me feel better. It did somehow. Seeing that there was no way to get a rise out of him, people eventually left it alone, commenting only amongst themselves now and again that of all the people to be blessed with such confidence, why should he be so lucky? This was to say that they hated who they were and what they looked like, and that this was amplified because the little prince did not hate himself in the ways that made their loathing and deprecation seem quite so moral in comparison.  

Part of me wanted to accept Eugene as he presented himself; part of me wondered if his ‘amusement’ wasn’t in truth a desperate cry for attention. No one would know that the Hewletts were twins were it not for the fact that everyone knew them as nobles. Ellie was thin past the point of allurement if not envy. Calling herself a ‘vegan’ meant that no one could call her ‘anorexic’, which I feared she was quickly becoming - completely unnoticed in a culture that cultivated a sickness it named self-control. For all of her efforts to please them, she was invisible to her parents. Eugene once mentioned off hand that he now got the same attention from mummy dearest that the student body had first afforded him as she - commenting cruelly on his physique as though it were her own, so much did it reflect upon her - often denied him supper on the rare occasion they found themselves under the same roof. ‘Who wants to eat tofu though?’ he then asked rhetorically, which seemed fair and gave him some degree of perceived principle he would otherwise lack amongst his peers.  I looked at the breakfast Fabienne and I had steady worked our way through, thinking that Eugene was unapologetically himself when he had so many incentives not to be. I challenged myself that if so many people loved him alone on the basis of his character and confidence, why wouldn’t these affections transcend into the realm of romance?

“Oh. My. God.”

Fabienne blushed. “I know it is … that it is never going to happen. That it wouldn’t even if my too-obvious plan had worked out to the end of where we were at least all hanging out together. But I think – returning to John, I have written a lot of letters with no response. I would have been elated at this point with any answer whatsoever. Maybe I made a mistake in my grammar or spelling or syntax? Maybe I sounded like an idiot, but still at least he could -”

“I have known Gene my whole life, I doubt that is it,” I tried to reassure her, though I struggled to think of where the problem could possibly lie. The Hewletts were medieval in all of the ways absent form fairy tales. This affected him far less than it did his siblings as he had never stood to inherit any substantial holdings and would not need to wed someone of rank in order to hold his own. Maybe things were different now, with his brother being sick. Maybe Edmund’s condition occupied him to the point where nothing else existed the way it otherwise would. I knew his grades were not the best. I knew he could do better if he cared at all. But he had his own version of Ellie’s ‘fine’ that took the form of going home every weekend to make things ‘better’. He stole eggs and meat and dairy products for his brother, who, like him, did not subscribe to their father’s faux-principles. No one who knew about his thievery thought anything of it because of his size, and so he had spent the past few months visiting Edmund every weekend, supplementing his diet with food that he knew his brother to have enjoyed, that would help build strength. He was always a little sad when he returned to school; whether it had to do with that place or this, I could not say. It was possible that in the midst of all of the tragedy, Fabie’s timing was tragically off. Maybe he had somehow missed it.

“Just even, for him to acknowledge me as something other than the girl he barely can even bring himself to recognise as competition.” Fabienne closed her eyes, continuing, “Music is the only place where I can even hope to measure with the rest of you, the only thing that is truly international. Even maths we write differently in France. And he just … I don’t think there is a song he doesn’t know or can’t play, and not just on violin. I know you don’t think him particularly handsome, at least not in the same way his siblings are, but he is witty and graceful and genuine in everything he does. I love him and he knows it … he must know this, and I get that with everything going on right now in their lives it is not fair of me to expect anything of him … and I am sorry that I am even,” she exhaled slowly, shook her head and directed an encouraging smile at me. “My point is, from this John’s point of view – he is probably shy too. No. He is shy. We all can see that much. I think it would mean the world to him if you just said ‘thank you.’ And then maybe you could go from there?”

“No. Fabie. You need to tell him.”

“John? What makes you think he would want to speak to me? I think it would mean more coming from you.”

“Gene! Fabie – Speaking from my very limited experience, I am certain he is flattered. Maybe a little lost for words. Seeing as you have experience with at least writing about your feelings,” I suggested, “maybe we could help each other out?”

 

* * *

 

Up in my dorm, we found Ellie faced with frustration – an afternoon outing and nothing practical to wear. Her elegant attire was strewn out all over her bed, covering the bounty of woollen blankets she claimed she needed to sleep with the delicate details of pieces not yet available in designer show rooms. Though socioeconomic questions had yet to truly enter my conscious or consideration, I had always found a certain injustice that this particular element of the culture of Versailles persisted long after every western revolution had been fought, finished and countered. After the middle classes across Europe had grown complacent and forty-percent of the franchise showing up on a Sunday equated to a high electoral turn out, and most people cared even less for the remnants of monarchy, the Hewletts, and families like theirs, were still sent samples of various spring collections with the understanding that they would model them for a few weeks before stuffing the designer pieces back into their wardrobes where they would await the next charity auction. In 2003, it seemed, this power ought to be reserved for the wives and girlfriends of footballers, who perhaps singularly among Britain’s idle idols, would not lay their lace to waste away from the eyes of would-be admirers. Ellie Hewlett, standing in the terry bathrobe issued by our school before her opened treasure chest, greeted Fabienne and I with a pout. “Ah! It is not fair,” she said, shaking her head for precisely the opposite reason I was shaking mine.

I picked a dress at random and held it against myself before the long mirror we had hanging on the inside of our door. As my romantic fantasies began to form, taking the shape of a balcony or a long staircase standard in the daydreams among those of my age and literary interests, Ellie told me I could keep it. “This too,” she said, throwing another of the same length at me. Her long legs recalled straws, stilts and birds that hunted fish by swooping them up in their three-pronged spears, but in these dresses they would say ‘sex object’ to the faculty on the sole basis that they showed her knees. Ellie had already had the experience of sitting in detention for a few days in a uniform with an extended hem where she had been invited to think of how she had interrupted the education of her male classmates. Our school felt the same way about shoulders and elbows. I glanced back at her, remembering how terribly she had cried when Sir told her that she was dressed like a harlot – that she was inviting ‘it’ (whatever ‘it’ was.) When Ellie said she had ‘nothing to wear’, I realised she meant it.

“What kind of statement are you trying to make?” Fabienne offered upon accepting the Ellie was not, as I had promised, angry or in any way taken aback by her presence; either that or she was too star struck by the names on the tags to much else much mind.

“Take it, if you want,” Ellie replied of a mini skirt she noticed her otherwise-rival eyeing with envy. “Just make sure if you wear it no one with a service record sees you in it. They either have the same standards as al-Qaeda or are trying to prepare us for eventual capitulation,” she murmured. “Sorry, I am not trying to be mean, you’d look absolutely lovely in it, I am quite certain. I just imagine that you would have the same sort of problems that I would. I don’t want that. It’s yours, just … take caution.”

“Ellie,” Fabienne said as she moved to embrace the girl everyone else knew did not take well to touch, “you needn’t give me expensive gifts by way of apology. I am sorry, too.”

“I’m not … sorry? Whatever should I be sorry for?” Ellie asked as she pulled herself from the hug. “Take the Valentino, or leave it. I can’t use it so if you want it, it is yours.”

“Where are you going?” I piped in, seeing Fabienne’s reticent bewilderment. I would tell her later, privately, that neither Ellie nor anyone in her household paid for the £750 skirt, that she likely did not understand fashion in terms of monetary value and was unaware that such gestures could be off putting. I would have to tell Ellie later on that it simply was not ladylike to offer riches  with the disinterest of producing a tissue or tampon from her purse for a girl in need.

Ellie did not answer my question, so I asked again.

“Nowhere, it seems,” she sighed.

That was fair. There was only so much one could do around here on a rainy Sunday. The library was locked until Monday, and the football and polo matches had both been flooded out. To my knowledge, the armoury was open, but none of her fellow fencers doubled as fellow boarders. The groundskeeper went to church on Sundays, by which we all knew he went to a pub somewhere in Yorkshire where he lost himself in John Smith’s and his rent to some John or another at a billiards table. The only option was another dorm or the commons, where I supposed I would wait for my John after Fabienne and I had devised something wonderfully clever to say to him. I understood Ellie’s reluctance to wear something from a fall collection, her uniform, or pieces borrowed from both. She had appearances to maintain and kneecaps of the kind that threatened the integrity of our institution which she could not hope to conceal. I felt bad about abandoning her, especially in the Channel I’d slipped into, but surely, she would understand my desire to speak to the boy who afforded me the privilege of serving as his muse. “Stunning!” she smiled. I blushed.

Fabienne held the skirt against her hips with some degree of caution. “Where would you go, if you were not put off by disciplinary action?” she asked.

“To town,” Ellie said. “A test run.”

“Are you running away?” Fabienne gasped, contrasting Ellie’s disinterest with her tendencies towards drama.

“Planning my escape,” she said with a slight nod. “Not forever, for a weekend. Next weekend. This is just to test how much time we need to get to the station and back. John said there is a café nearby that was once a pub when that was profitable. They never cancelled their Sky subscription upon making the switch. We will lunch there, watch some Serie A and come back, hopefully late for supper and in time to be scolded for not embodying proper officerial behaviour along with everyone else.”

“Ellie’s John?” Fabienne demanded. I wanted to know the same.

“Is he your John now?” Ellie asked with more excitement than I would ordinarily accredit to her character. She then grimaced and added an amendment to her awkward wording, “Oh that sounds dreadful … so put. Did you talk to him?”

“He was not at breakfast. I … talked to Fabienne and -”

It took me fifteen minutes with occasional pauses for input from the other parties present to detail my morning discussion. By the time I was though, Fabienne had apologised twice more and Ellie, though offering no admission or acknowledgement of her own wrongdoings, accepted insofar as she seemed to be amused if not as fully enamoured as I was with the idea of her brother having been courted by the enemy.

“Oh my God, you are both idiots!” she exclaimed excitedly. “Fabie, how can you be surprised by his apparent lack of interest when you never signed your name to the lets you wrote him. Here,” she said, producing a bundle of letters from her desk door. “He’d asked me if I knew anything about this last semester and I asked you seeing as you are in orchestra as well – do you remember? And you seemed to know nothing about it! And now, I’ll have you know that I am quite cross with myself for not having it figured all out on my own.”

“I’m cross that you had this secret and did not tell me,” I replied.

“Why would I? It didn’t pertain to you and, to be frank, neither Gene nor I knew much of what to make of it.” Turning to Fabie, she pouted, “Why didn’t you just tell him?”

“Honestly? Because I thought you did not like me.”

“How do you think twins work?” Ellie returned, genuinely puzzled. “Even if I hadn’t that has absolutely no bearing on what conclusions he might come to.” She closed her eyes, rubbed her temples and sighed. “He … is intrigued by you, this you not … what you otherwise project” she paused, “to bury this, I don’t dislike you, Fabienne. I understand what it is like to have to constantly act as a representative, to do everything right and thus to do everything wrong and to be troubled as to how this can possibly be the case. A secret though? It doesn’t much matter if people actually _like_ you or not as long as you have earned their respect.” Addressing us both, she added, “I really … I really don’t get the obsession you both seem to have with popularity – what do you think? There are two hundred people at this school; everyone is popular. Why on earth would you want to have hordes of people wanting to ‘be like you’ when they are otherwise so much more interesting as they are? That is what I found so bothersome in you, Fabie. You are smart and strong and talented all on your own and you would settle to be my second? No. I won’t have it. Fuck, I don’t even want to be me.”

Fabienne nodded and told us to wait. She emerge ten minutes later from two doors down the hall with a pair of skinny jeans and a pink pullover. “Real weekend clothes in exchange for that skirt you say you can’t use?” she said, twirling, modelling it for us. “Gorgeous,” I said. Ellie thanked her, graciously, even humbly, for the outfit. “When you talk to my brother, presumably when he gets in,” she said, “be direct. Boys are daft and struggle with subtlety.”

It occurred to me that Ellie had a lot more experience with talking to them than either of us did. “What should I say to John?” I asked.

“Are you coming?”

“Can I?” My heart stopped.

“You might want to change,” Ellie shrugged.

The rain had stopped but the air was still wet enough that my hair had no hope of maintaining reasonable dimensions. Twirling a lock of it between my fingers, I decided that I needed all of the help I could get. “Must I?” I asked, looking down at my pretty new dress.

“I don’t know the path. That is the point.”

“Wear combat boots like edgy girls do,” Fabienne suggested. “Very runway. Very now.”

“I don’t think lads really care or notice that much,” Ellie said. “Clothes I mean. Anyway, wasn’t his primary concern with you as a physical presence the colour of your eyes?” she teased, batting her long, dark lashes at me. I puckered my lips. “Knowing quite literally nothing else about him,” Ellie continued briskly, “I don’t exactly think he is the type to stare at shoulders, elbows or kneecaps.”

 

* * *

 

By the end of the ten-minute walk from our building to the edge of the grounds where Ellie had arranged to meet her co-conspirators over a morning chat in Morse Code, I was thankful for the bulky boots that had only been in my wardrobe because of the place we planned to escape. The ground was saturated; each step created a puddle where one had not existed seconds prior. The sky was still grey, which served to make the colours that rain revealed all the more vibrant. As long as my feet were dry, I loved this sort of weather. The world was washed and I was lost in the same pallet that worked its way into so many of my watercolours. It was fascinating how many colours and tones shied from the sun, I thought as I looked down from the lime green leaves growing from wry branches so drenched they seemed as dark as night to the sea I stood in, amber sand against emerald grass, both blended and blurred under an inch of water. I looked over at my companion, who seemed to be making a game with the ground, skipping, sometimes, before jumping to avoid the splash she created, laughing lightly when it did not catch her. The mild chill left a light crimson on her cheeks and absent from extravagance and expectation, she seemed something of a porcelain doll. Watching her, I wondered if this was what adults meant when they said that she would grow into her features; someday she would grow into herself. Ellie often looked like a caricature to me because she consciously played one when people were watching. In weather where few ventured out, she felt safe in her charms. I stopped and stared at my feet, hoping to see a reflection in the plashet that would say that the same magic had worked on me.

“Effie?”

“What?”

“You are not nervous, are you?”

I wasn’t. I was lost in one of my paintings much in the way John described in his poem. I could not have asked for an atmosphere more fitted to the idea I had formed of the two of us and accepted as a shared secret truth. Well, as secret as anything was in four walls. Fabie knew, and was likely in the process of relaying adventures I had not yet been on to Mary-Anne, sounding like a Jane Austen in the age of the twenty-four hour news cycle. Her version would likely substitute weaponry for watercolour, and when Mary-Anne repeated it to Kate, Emma, or whomever she first ran into my unrealised romance would be rendered into a fairy tale. I felt confident that by the time I returned to our building, Fabienne Bouchard could not be called a liar on my count.

Ellie was teasing me, probably, but she had a sparkle in her eye I had not seen since she had been sent to live in her uncle’s residence where he sat on parliament, the capitol having trained her to seem as insincere in everything as the adults around her debating tax reform.

“You would think it was you who were in love,” I said.

“No … only you would think that. Maybe,” she stammered. “The truth is, I don’t believe in love. I mean – I believe it exists for some people, for you, for Fabie, for John – the way horoscopes exist for loads of people as a very real contingent -”

“Typical Scorpio,” I paused, suddenly thinking forward to what Fabienne planned on after she had tired of playing my mistral. Eleonore Hewlett, like the rest of her relations, could be deceptively mean. I wondered if Edinburgh had taught her to disguise anger as indifference without my notice and suddenly worried that her short skips acted as some kind of victory dance. I should not have said anything about my friend’s crush. Eugene could prove quite ugly as well were he in the mood for it, and his weekends were always black. “Does Gene feel the same way?” I challenged, harder than expected.

“About astrology, certainly. You know how he worships at Edmund’s alter,” Ellie answered, gazing down, keen to ignore what I had really asked. Their brother had been reading astrophysics at St. Andrews before he had taken ill, I remembered. I wanted to give Ellie the benefit of doubt, to think that her sudden posture confessed her guilt over never visiting his bedside herself rather than some ill intent directed towards the girl who had given her clothes that made her look less like the spoiled princess I hated to admit I had often known her to be.

“And what does _Edmund_ think about love?”

Ellie seemed to consider this in earnest, offering lightly after the moment lapsed, “That it is more important than duty.”

“What do you mean?”

“That he places a value on it gender prevents me from sharing.”

“So Fabienne and Eugene?” I prodded. Ellie’s face fell and her tone shifted.

“What about them? Honestly, why do you do this?” she pleaded. “Why must you constantly remind me that no one is ever going to write me poems or letters or call me lovely in any manner, because if they did I would be obliged to kindly refuse their advances? Love doesn’t exist for me because it can’t. The same is true for Edna and no one thinks _her_ a bitch because of it. I am happy for you and I in no way resent your – or anyone else’s – pursuit of happiness. I would appreciate it very much if you would cease pretending that you know what it is to be me. I would not hurt someone for the sake of it and I am sorry, truly, if I ever gave you cause to believe otherwise.”

She exhaled slowly and as her breath evaporated into the cooler air, I feared her hidden character would fade with it.

“What do you believe in, Ellie?” I asked gently.

“Myself,” she answered, adding a bit louder when someone else called her name, “And that Lazio is going to get a proper thrashing! Ban, the fuck is that?” she asked, pointing to her own neck, her mime of a scarf –presumably the one he wore - turning into a hangman’s noose.

“Fuck you think?” he laughingly replied, punting the ball he had been playing with by himself over to her. Ellie kicked it back, hitting the tall metal fence behind him that separated the school from the base. “Goal … Scotland -” she said as she ran the last few metres, likely as much to get away from me as it was to greet the boy who matched her finger-guns pointed at the ever-grey sky with one aimed at her. “Scoootlannd…” he echoed, mimicking a shot, “Fails to qualify.”

“Probably,” she admitted, play-acting as though he had shot her through the heart. I watched all this from a distance. Ban Tarleton was hardly among my favourites, but he never failed to force my best friend to meet him at his level, pulling at the ends of one of her long braids while she poked him in the eye. I have heard it said of boys who are bullies that ‘he is only mean because he likes you’ and even after all that has transpired since, I believe that to have been the case when it came to the two of them – not romantically, of course. Ellie was afraid of love and Ban would always shy from that kind of commitment, but he liked her best when she was being honest, and she honestly thought he was an arse which he rather loved playing at. He said something I could not hear and handed her an orange which made her laugh and I approached, albeit hesitantly, my attention recaptured by the figure standing to his right.

Ellie turned to greet him, extending her hand and offering her name and with a slight gesture, mine.

“Elizabeth,” he repeated softly.

Colours were more vibrant when it rained which was likely what had initially lead to my preference towards letting water produce them on my canvases. John Graves Simcoe defied what I understood of art. His eyes were such a pale, understated blue that a single drop of paint could not possibly be diluted enough to produce the same shade. Their lashes were all but invisible against skin nearly as pale as the white beanie that worked on him like a peruke in times past. The world vanished and my page was as blank as my mind. I was descending a staircase. Standing on a balcony in Verona. Attending a ball in Bath. Before I could stop myself, I fell into a curtsey, curing myself for not taking Eleonore’s advice about practical clothes. John seemed momentarily taken aback, but rather than allowing me solidarity in my awkwardness, he offered me his hand and his name as he gave a slight bow. We shared our first smile as if laughing at a joke only we two had heard.

“Charmed, I’m sure,” I said the way my aunt would to people she hoped to impress. At the same time, Tarleton demanded to know what was going on.

“I told you not to bring anyone,” he chided.

“First, you do not tell me what to do. Ever. That is not how this works. Second, Effie wanted to come and so she came and you will not be rude to her on any count,” Ellie insisted, holding up her fingers as she spoke. He reached for her hand, and, pushing down out of his direct line of vision, countering, “Goddamn it Ells, we are going to get caught.” It struck me that he said this as though he hoped not to. It had been my understanding that he wanted to evoke a reaction with every dumb thing he did. He would certainly get one from me.

“If you don’t let me come,” I said as Ellie stepped to the side, her black eyes widening in the girlish amusement that belonged to any argument, as I knew from our dorms too well, “I will ensure that you won’t go at all. Anywhere. Ever.”

“Yeah?” he smirked.

“I’ll burn or break something of value, tell Sir that I’d seen you do it and then it will be your word against mine, and I don’t need to break in to any office to know that your record will stand to support my claim. You’ll spend every weekend from this until your last copying from the encyclopaedia until your fingers break, looking out the window - forlorn, watching on while all your mates have a splendid time outside of your company. And then you’ll wish for mine when whomever drew the short straw that week smacks you with a ruler for your lack of concentration.” I fumed. The instant I finished, Ellie’s words about how to talk to boys returned to me as I won a round of applause from her hands. Be direct. Force them to respect you. Ban nodded begrudgingly. “Or’right,” he said in a heightened accent horrid to my ears. Looking up at John behind me, he added, “How are we meant to do this?”

Be direct.

Force them to respect you.

I swallowed. This was sage, I suppose, if one was arguing a motion before parliament or making their case as to which mid-table manger should get the sack to some stranger in a pub. Ellie Hewlett had more experience than I did, but hers was restricted to these sorts of activities and not to love in which she did not even believe. It wasn’t Fabienne she had been trying to thwart up in the dorm, but me.

John, the boy who thought I made the world more beautiful was standing close enough to me that I should have been able feel his warmth, but instead I shivered, afraid to turn around and meet a pair of pale blue eyes I felt sure had since frozen.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I only have one note for you this time, but it is about one of those insane episodes of history that we look back at today thinking cannot possibly be true, but I swear to you, I swear **Serie A** the first tier of Italian football was bloody huge in the 90s. All of these kids would have grown up in an era when calcio wasn’t regarded as a chore and would have known, presumably if it fell into their interests, about teams like **Lazio**. I know right? Most of us were alive in the 90s, even if we don’t remember much of it … Seems crazy.
> 
> Annnnyway, thank you so, so much to everyone who took the time to read and comment on the last chapter. It came as such a surprise and really made my whole week. I am about to leave (actually, to the UK) for a few days and I wanted to get something out before I left. Hide and Seek just was not an option time-wise … but this story here really has me thinking about the people these characters grow up to be and I managed to get (even more!) of the wedding chapter done as a result. (Want a taste? Want to hear my all-time-favourite joke that I have been trying to work in to that text for nearly two years? ...and now have, thanks to this.) 
> 
> Thanks for reading, and thanks for all the inspiration you provide. And don’t worry, next time, the lovers say much more than one line apiece to each other. ;) 
> 
> XOXO - Tav


	3. An Allegory of Melancholy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Effie and John have an awkward almost-date, Ban clandestinely sorts a personal crisis and Ellie adjusts her crown.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Christmas, Reinette! Against all likelihood, I managed to get this out before getting on a train tomorrow morning.  
> While the timing may be a gift, the subject material struggles to fit that mould – so we are doing the thing.
> 
> Warnings include: manipulation, anorexia, orphans, envy and … Djinn. It was really only a matter of time.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

I wanted to return to the Ides of March. To the sack and fall of the empire that bore the city’s name. To the nepotism and simony that came to define the papacy. To the short lived republics that dotted the nineteen century. To the rise of fascism.  I wanted the Lazio Ultras to call for a return to that radical and repressive system, for the team score, for a brawl to start, for anything to happen in the Stadio Olimpico in Rome that might serve the purpose of distraction. The match was dull, and I feared for what should have been my teenage dream.

Instead of talking, testing for myself the very flirtation tips I had forced upon Fabienne in earlier hours, I merely sat beside the boy who wrote to me in verse with my eyes fixed on another, bothered by the same question I always asked myself when Ban dominated the conversation; namely, if his words and actions veered more towards altruistic or vengeful. I knew from Ellie and her political debate that substituted the time which ‘ordinary’ girls our age would use for gossip that sometimes it was possible to be both in simulation. In the case of her _other_ best friend this speculative seemed a constant. At least whenever I was around. He made it clear that I was not meant to be there. Not that morning. Not ever.

Ellie and John shared a laugh and I began to share Ban’s doubts. Ellie ate a slice of the orange she offered my play-acting poet. Then another. John continued to express doubt within the construct of the rules of engagement I had had a hand in writing for the war only Tarleton had want to wage. I realised as I sat in silence that I, too, should have long been an active combatant. Naming ‘fear’ as ‘politeness’, however, I was loath to take to arms. Ban winked at me. If he had his way, I would never share in any of the spoils.

At the start of my second semester and his fourth, we had gotten into an intense argument in the corridor outside the dining hall where such disputes often exploded after I had overheard him particularly hard on Ellie. ‘ _She deserves it,_ ’ he had countered. ‘ _She is not just hurting herself, she is fucking everyone who cares about her and if I have to be the one to say it_ , _so be it. I don’t mind and I don’t care if she hates me right now or whenever._ ’

‘ _Her brother_ -’ I tried to protest.

‘ _Can’t bloody well serve as an excuse for everything! This predates that. You know it. And even if it didn’t, that would be no reason to do nothing,_ ’ his chastisement came out almost as a plea. And how could it not?  Whereas I had a pallet full of brightly coloured paint with which to contrast the January grey filtering from the sky to all of our souls, Ban Tarleton had no pastime, no hidden worlds in which to escape. The sports he played were all off-season, the ones he followed served a constant reminder that the girl he had walked that path with as long as memory served was vanishing - her smiles becoming as painfully thin as her waistline. I saw all of this, but where I might have pitied him, I instead shouted, ‘ _There is no need to be rude!_ ’ I had, after all, just seen Ellie swallow his slights, and I would be damned if I watched it happen again.

‘ _Elizabeth’_ Ban smarted, calling me by a name I had only otherwise heard from the mouth of my aunt whilst in the midst of the exact opposite sort of lecture, uncannily similar in tone though he was. _‘Manners don’t exist as an obstacle. At least they shouldn’t. You can’t keep using them as an excuse not to say anything. If Ellie doesn’t eat something she’ll die._’

‘ _Banastre, you are not going to affect anything by making a scene,’_ I retorted as I told myself it was not as bad as he was making out. _‘That – in there – that was for you, not for her. You aren’t going to force her to eat by calling her names and telling her she will wind up in hospital. You just want to make yourself feel better by making her feel bad._ ’

‘ _You can’t ignore a problem and hope it will go away_ ,’ he answered, almost desperate.

The terrible thing was – I could. The date I felt I was decidedly not on taught me as much, as did John, who only recognised my presence insofar as it did not interfere with his quest. I felt ashamed at my envy, at my anger, at myself. If Ellie was so desperate to disappear, I wished her to be gone. I wished I more resembled the girl in John’s verse, fearing that in my eyes he saw my soul at its blackest.

I was selfish. I wanted to return to my studio and remember his pale eyes in diluted paint, to remember how pure I felt when they were fixed on me alone. We were meant to be trapped in the moment we first met. But Ban was rude and he was right and in this small café on a Sunday afternoon nothing felt real. Somewhere in lust, or somewhere before, I had lost the idea I had of myself to the reality it did not match.

I closed my eyes as I traced back through my missteps. It had been a long journey into town. I wanted to go back to where I was, to who I was before I was jealous of everyone at the table.

 

* * *

 

He was attentive to the point of awkwardness. As he spoke in the haughty high pitch I had been promised, his soft gaze remained fixed on me even as he addressed the others. There would have been some secret charm in this had his counterpart not done the same, asking if I was cold as though he hoped I would give him an answer that would serve as an excuse for the party to continue without me. I smiled as I stood my ground.

There was a hole in the fence separating the school from the base. I had heard about it before, knowing that day-comers sometimes crawled through to use our sport fields when school was not in session. The ball was to give us cover, John said as he punted it to his dorm mate after we had all crawled through (at least in my case, worrying about removing mud stains from a lace dress – itself snagging on the destroyed wire warped from use). If we were to be seen and subsequently scolded by sentinels, he instructed, we would ‘confess’ to having snuck on to school grounds to play. We were on our way back to Section D, which served the dual purpose of being situated closest to the gate we were meant to use to exit into the town proper, and, giving that the block was used exclusively as temporary housing for transient servicemen, no one would question our surnames – regardless of what we offered. If we were ‘caught’, John said, we would likely be offered a lift. Otherwise, it would be a ten to fifteen minutes trek through the base by foot.

It was not difficult to get out, but without military IDs it was impossible to get back in. We would need to walk around the back way, entering our institution by climbing a fence closer to the football pitch, explaining that we had kicked the ball over and had simply gone to retrieve it.

‘ _Do you do this a lot?_ ’ I asked.

‘ _Often,_ ’ John answered.

‘ _I’m a little surprised_ ,’ I admitted. ‘ _I always thought you spent your weekends in the library._ ’

His eyes widened slightly, surprised to learn that I thought of him at all. ‘ _Oh, I do. In York. I’ve …_ ’ John murmured, trailing off.

‘ _What?_ ’ I nudged.

_‘I rather exhausted much of the reading material that pertains to my interests.’_

_‘That is impressive.’_

_‘It really isn’t. We have all of seven volumes of poetry, I …’_ he parried before I could praise him, _‘I grew up on a base. They are all fairly similar in build; the logistics were of little challenge.’_

I wondered why someone who spent so much time inside of books only seemed to want to speak of the world in a way that left me longing for the comfort of their covers. Maybe he was used to being mocked; maybe he mistook my smile for a laugh. I knew I had no right to being disappointed. He had been raised amongst warriors and may have wanted me to see him in the same light. At that point of our lives we all wanted to stand out by fitting in. This part, at least, I had done before.

‘ _Where is your father stationed?_ ’ I asked.

‘ _Pakistan_ ,’ he said as though the word tasted sour. I wondered if I was off tempo, or if he had tired of this dance.

‘ _Oh … that’s, really far away._ ’

‘ _I grew up there,_ ’ John expanded.

‘ _Do you miss it?_ ’ I tried.

‘ _I miss him_ ,’ he said, followed quickly with an apology of the sort society dictated was to be offered to orphans. I frowned as I was given to at hearing forced sympathy and John looked away. ‘ _It is fine_ ,’ I said after some time had passed.

‘ _It’s not,_ ’ he replied flatly, his slightly unsettling voice an octane higher. ‘ _My parents are dead too. I know what it is like_.’

I found myself offering apologetic empathy, realising that my words matched and mirrored many of those I had been repeatedly given throughout my life. It was instinct but I saw it was not empty and felt bad for every instance of ingratitude, every time I wondered how a stranger could mourn the passing of someone they had never met. For whatever reason, I explained this aloud, cursing myself all the while for coming off as inelegant to the oddest boy I had ever met. To his credit, John was a good listener, though he lack finesse and even familiarity with conversation. No one came in a patrol care to interrupt me, to spare us both from my coarse chatter that likely had the John longing for a library, polite as he was being.

Rain came and went in scattered storms, and when it seemed the drizzle would not soon subside, John offered me his hat and jacket, not wanting that I should catch a cold before next weekend.

‘ _You want me to come next weekend_ ,’ I paraphrased, half looking for further affirmation, half elated that I had not already ruined it by speaking on subjects as overcast as the sky.

‘ _Are you Liverpool or Everton, then?_ ’ he asked, pulling his beanie down over my ears. I could not answer even if I had one, taken as I was by the warmth of his hand on my cheek and his coper coloured curls - cropped short to standard – revealed in his hat’s removal. Without thinking, I reached out to touch them, wondering if freckles dotted his impossibly pale skin with the same warm shades in summer. His cheeks grew a brighter shade of red and, embarrassed by my audaciousness, I pulled my hand back. ‘ _I’m sorry I, I was just taken by surprise._ ’

‘ _It is a rather unlucky feature, here at least,_ ’ he smiled uncomfortably. ‘ _People used to do that all the time overseas. Especially when I was little and my hair a few shades lighter. I kept it, or rather, my dad kept it long until I was three or four in accordance with local custom. Sorry, this is um -’_

_‘No I want to hear.’_

_‘Do you know what a Djinn is?’_

_‘A drink?”_

_‘No, well … not as I mean it. This – it is something almost akin to a ghost story.’_

_‘Oh, then please proceed,’_ I grinned.

‘ _So in that entire cultural region there is this superstition, if you can even call it that. The Koran talks about them, from what I’ve heard. But no one does, and yet everyone does. Everyone has a really good Djinn story somewhere in the family,_ ’ he winked with his words. ‘ _They are these creatures made from smokeless fire who live on a plain parallel to our own –that sometimes intersects, when something is disrupted. Anyway, in a lot of different countries over there, boys’ hair is kept long with the logic that if they are disguised as girls, these Djinn won’t be as tempted to kidnap them at night. Kidnap or kill. I only remember it because one of the maids thought that my hair was red because a Djinn had tried to take me back to their world when I was a baby, leaving some of its fire behind._ ’

How else could such a gorgeous colour be explained? John was fire, superstition aside.

‘ _Glad it was not successful_ ,’ I poked him. Laughing, he offered me his arm, which I gladly accepted.

‘ _It is funny. There people see my hair and imagine that a demon fancied me. Here, I am the devil himself._ ’

‘I think you have some competition there,’ I said, indicating with a nod to Ban and Ellie who were passing the ball between them a few paces ahead of us, the former turning now and again to offer me evidence of his indignation with a hard stare.

‘ _He is intense_ ,’ John sighed, ‘ _but he is alright if you close your eyes and tune him out in regular intervals._ ’

‘ _Pfft. If only that were possible. Arrogant, I think is more the word you are after_ ,’ I said, sticking out my tongue at our bratty brother-by-proximity.

‘ _I can’t argue you there. But he has a good heart,’_ he paused. ‘ _He would make for a decent Djinn though, I think. More on the mischievous end than the malevolent … They are talking about me, you know. That is why he keeps looking back. He is telling her that he tried to get me to eat an orange this morning but I wouldn’t – saying that I had never seen one before, that they don’t have them in Islamabad._ ’

_‘Is that true?’_

_‘No, of course not.’_ He seemed dismissive.

_‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound dumb, I just, well I have never been there.’_

John stopped, dropping every lightness of tone. _‘Elizabeth, I never intended to make you feel as though you were, or as though your question was. It is just a lie Ban concocted that I am meant to go along with.’_

 _‘Why?_ ’ I sneered.

‘ _You don’t know? He tricks Eleonore into eating at least once a day – more often than that if inspiration presents itself. He is explaining to her that I am often ill, and she will in turn explain to me that oranges have a lot of vitamin C and that I wouldn’t suffer colds as often or as long if I ate them. I’ll reference a dated superstition that they are poisonous and she’ll demonstrate to me that this idea is pure folly. It isn’t about aesthetic, you know. It is about control._ ’

I did not know what to say. In hindsight, I should not have spoken until the speech has sunken and settled. Instead, in my moment’s consideration of all of what I had just been told, I said, ‘ _That’s … forward._ ’

‘ _It isn’t that I don’t feel for her,’_ he whispered. _‘I do. It is just that all of the Hewletts are like that, all the ones I’ve met anyway. Grasping at the two conflicting ideals they will never entirely obtain, control and freedom. I suppose that could be said of all of us. With them it is somehow more striking._ ’

‘ _It is almost poetic how you phrase it._ ’

‘ _I’m sorry,_ ’ John replied. ‘ _I read too much._ ’

‘ _John … on the subject of poetry, what you wrote to me -’_

 _‘What I wrote to you?_ ’ he choked.

I recited his poem. After confessing quietly that he had not realize that a ‘rather weak’ example of his work was in with the publications he had leant to Ellie, he was silent for the twenty or so minutes that remained on our walk to the café he had recommended, commenting only when I asked that the other two parties in our company were arguing over possible defensive line ups and substitutions. Both managers were evidently dealing with a spell of injuries. I did not know anything about football. I managed to keep that much to myself.

 

* * *

 

“You asked me earlier what club I support,” I re-joined the conversation. “I never gave you an answer, but I’ll admit I am solidly Team Ellie. Eat it,” I said.

Two slices remained of Ellie’s second orange. “It won’t help,” John said, trying to supress an unfortunately timed sniffle. “It is the same thing as when a Brazilian star joins a Prem side and has a rough two seasons. There is no way to combat the British climate. It takes a certain period of adjustment.”

“Yea … but there we are talking two years tops and you’ve been in the UK for three,” Ban said with an enthusiasm that did not fit the conversation. Ellie had ordered a coffee, and being awful drank it black and unsweetened. Ban had been curious, taken a sip, declared it to be the most terrible thing he had ever tasted and subsequently abandoned his white tea in its favour. I hoped against hope that this would be a one off. “Might see a doctor, mate,” he continued. “I’m being completely serious and since we are already on the topic of sport I’ll admit my concern comes from selfish reasons. Bloody hell, look at you! If you were fit we could well use you absolutely fucking everywhere -”

“John doesn’t fancy sport,” Ellie interrupted. I had the impulse to kick her from under the table, fearing where she was leading. She continued and I cursed my foot for not being quicker. “He fancies himself a poet.”

“I don’t,” John said.

“No?” my best friend challenged with a mischievous smile. “I would beg to differ.” I again wanted her to disappear and told her this with a look she pretended not to notice.

“I would be among the first to know if I had any ability insofar as artistic expression, I assure you Miss,” John droned dryly.

“You tit!” Ban exclaimed. “You wrote a poem? You didn’t? Was it homework? Fuck mate, look if you can do another -”

“We didn’t have homework,” John said, averting his eyes down to his tea.

“Was the missive a one off?” Ellie asked.

“The fuck is a missive?”

“The reason you might pay a tad more attention in class, ye cunt.”

“For what little it is worth,” John whispered to me as Ellie fought to impart on Ban the relative importance of an education in the rudimentary vocabulary both seemed given to in public houses in each other’s presence, “I mean every word. And your eyes, Effie, they are the most beautiful of any I have ever seen. Like your paintings they defy trite, unexpected, and at once everything I had hoped to find. Forgive me if I seem to forward. I had never intended you to find my rather pathetic attempt at verse, and I would never be so presumptuous as to expect reciprocation or response – but lest my question be left unanswered – I could just as easily find myself lost in your hazel eyes as I am in what they see.”

I felt whole.

“Right, Effs – not to break in here, but John, be honest with me, have you ever had a proper wank? You can’t be serious with this shite. You write a girl a poem and then come at her with ‘ _lest my question be left unanswered – I could just as easily find myself lost in your eyes?’_ You’re putting far too much effort in. It is just weird if you ask me.”

“No one is. Now, would you kindly shut up?” I demanded through clenched teeth.

“Yea – that is like all you need. Right there,” Ban continued, using my words to whatever point he thought himself coming to. “Watch,” he commanded as his expression shifted. Ban slicked back the thick, dark hair displaced by play and precipitation. His eyes softened as they narrowed slightly, expanding as he raised his eyebrows in feigned excitement that he simultaneously looked as though he meant to suppress. “Christ I love this sort of weather,” he said to me, leaning in just slightly as he directed my attention to the window. “Everything looks like an unfinished painting, wouldn’t you say?”

In fact, I would. I wondered how he could possibly have known that. He looked back to me as though he thought I were the most beautiful creature the muses had ever dreamt, something I instantly recognised as ridiculous – both knowing that those were the terms in which Ban Tarleton saw himself and seeing my outline reflected in the glass. My hair bushing out everywhere save for the places having worn John’s hat for a half hour had impressed more than several strands to my scalp. “It is as though we are privileged to stand in the studio of some brilliant artist before they go on to gallery and acclaim,” he paused, laughing slightly. “It would be a privilege, nay, an honour,” he continued, his fingertips reaching out to graze mine, kissing them with tender warmth, “if you would be so keen to allow me a glimpse of yours sometime.”

“My studio?”

“Or anything else you might be willing to show me.” His fingers danced with mine until I was surprised to find myself holding his hand, which he brought to his lips, touching it with a chaste kiss. Dropping it, he also dropped his act. “Ah, don’t mind,” he said, directing his attention back to John. “That is how it is done though.”

“Has that ever worked for you?” I asked, albeit hypocritically. Had my fancy not already been fully taken with his dorm mate, I could imagine how easily I might eventually fall victim to his bedpost.

“Do you need more of a demonstration?” Ban asked, eyeing the waitress. “Right,” he said, taking a tally of out drinks, “Black tea – sugar?”

“One,” John replied, reaching for his wallet. Ban held up his hands in protest, saying the round was his.

“In that case I want another hot chocolate,” I said. “Work your ‘magic’ and get me extra marshmallows.”

“Done,” he promised with an assuredness that boarded bravado. “And two coffees.”

“Order them decaf,” John commanded.

“What is it?”

“Necessary if you mean to survive the night,” he warned. I giggled.

Once he was out of earshot, Ellie apologised to us both, cramming the past fifty minutes into a single line. “I’m sorry about Ban and whatever role I may have played in … that -”

“He is in love with you; you know that, don’t you?” John challenged. I looked at him with wide eyes, wondering if he saw something I didn’t, or rather if he was in truth every bit as petty and spiteful as everyone else we boarded with. I wondered if, having grown up outside of the full Anglican sphere of influence, he simply didn’t know what things were never to be said to certain company. Ellie exhaled slowly in umbrage, ticking her lips together the way she did when she struggled for strategy.

“Of course I know that,” she said dismissively and to my upmost shock. “I love him too, in truth, far more than I ought, but I hate hypotheticals and those who waste time entertaining them.” I looked at John, wondering if she spoke of us, or if she harboured Fabienne ill-will she would not otherwise voice. “We are friends, it is all we will ever be and all we can ever be and I for one am content to leave it there.” Admonition over, Ellie unfolded her hands and continued in a looser voice, “As to you two, on the opposite hand, please, please, please don’t take the critique to heart. It is terribly sweet that you invest in and inspire to a higher ideal. Effie really deserves no less. I should … go. I think. Give you time to get to know one another. Make sure Ban doesn’t get himself in too much trouble.”

I wanted her to stay.

“Ellie,” John said as she stood. “Forgive me; I did not intend to cause you any discomfort, I was merely commenting on-”

“I’m not blind, John,” she objected. “And you weren’t rude in the least. But I needn’t tell you the same can’t be said of all members of our company. I quite like this café and should rather hope to come back at some point. Let me go make sure that remains a possibility for us all,” she winked. “Have fun with your ‘hohe Minne’” while I halt its ‘niedere’ form if need be.”

I looked at her askance. “What?” she asked. “I’ve never known you to have an interest in romantic ballads,” I answered.

“Bullocks. We saw the Spice Girls together in Edinburgh when last you came to visit. 2 become 1?” she stuck out her tongue, “Maybe the best slow dance song ever written,” she teased as she sashayed to a far table where a group of what looked to be university students were yelling at another match on another television in the far corner of the former bar.

“Spice Girls?” John asked.

“I don’t know if it counts,” I defended.

“As poetry?”

“As the _band_. It was after Geri left so there was only four of them.”

“Was she your favourite?” he asked.

“No, Mel B was. Ellie’s was Mel C and yes – we did dress up as them in Old Town when we were eight, and yes, my hair looks _fan-tas-tic_ in cat-ears.”

“I believe it,” he laughed, confessing after a moment that he was relieved that there was some story from my youth almost as embarrassing in hindsight as the ghost story he told when words failed him. He was as flattered that I appreciated his poetry as I was at being the subject of it. The world got away from us as we began to know one another by way of literary epochs and childhood stories of our own. Roma won, I would be told on the return walk, three hours after we had meant to go. The German game that Ellie had invested herself in when she had tired of us and the Italians ended in a goalless draw. I had forgotten that football had even played a part in our afternoon, that we had purchased bus tickets for the following weekend and that I was not supposed to be the sort of girl who ran away for a night in search of love. I forgot how that idea of myself had ever entered my mind. Forgetting my manners, I fell into John’s arms as he helped me down from the fence we had to climb upon our return, kissing him as he returned my feet to the earth.

Ban cheered for us, or rather for John, which seemed to annoy him. “I don’t think they were drinking decaf,” I whispered.

“Nor do I, but fear not, I have a solution for that as well.”

Calling for us all to come, he took us to the side of the building and counting, moved a stone from the wall easily with his foot. I saw it was on a slider. “The entrance to the passageways,” he announced. I couldn’t believe they were real. “The one good thing Edmund pointed me to before he left.”

“Were you guys … were you close?”

Rather than answer, John, in a farce of the flirtation tips Ban had gone through pains to demonstrate, told me that whilst the kids ran amuck exploring the catacombs, we could have our rooms to ourselves.

“For sketching and writing?”

“And anything else you may desire, my lady.”

I wanted everything at once.

 

* * *

 

‘ _Harder,_ ’ she gasped, her cries of pleasure echoing throughout the hidden halls. ‘ _Yes, that’s is! Uhh! Don’t stop_.’

We were ten minutes into the tunnels, the last three of which we had walked with ghosts, or maybe Djinn. I could hear their bodies crashing against one another, the sound amplified by the stone walls and stale air, cold, damp and clammy. I could not see them and so they were everywhere, around every corner, in every bead of sweat I felt on the back of my neck, in every goose pimple on my bare arms. There was something exciting in the forbidden, in witnessing an act with ones ears. I found myself imagining that it were my limbs twisted around another as he held me up against the wall. I thought of John in the opposite role and suddenly my intruding daydream felt more sinful than the soundtrack from which it drew inspiration.

“Does this happen often?” I asked as I nudged John.

“What?”

I repeated my question.

“Does ‘what’ happen often?” he rephrased.

Studying his face in the dim light, he seemed deaf to the sex surrounding us. I wondered if there was something wrong with me, if I alone heard the hidden lovers, if they only existed in my head.

“Christ I hope so,” Ban smiled, clearly victim to the same mental encroachment as I. “It is brilliant, absolute filth of the highest order, this!”

‘ _Oh my God_ ,’ the scream faded into a whisper.

“Oh don’t stop on my account, Love,” Ban said. “I fully support all that you are adding to ambiance.”

Ellie looked ill and John injured. “I don’t know what is going on,” he said with a swallow. “I can’t hear what I can’t see.”

“Shit, your missing out, mate. There is some bird in attendance who is absolutely vile, it is glorious,” Ban explained airily – unbothered by the admission until he paused, pivoted and proceeded in earnest, “is that why your voice sounds the way it does? Like why you treat talking like it is such a bloody chore? Can you read lips? Do you have to? Is that -”

“Can you not always be so rude?” I demanded. Suddenly everything I found off before made sense in context. I had however, no construct for and could therefore not excuse or sympathise with the response John chose to Ban’s ignorant banter.

“Is there something you find funny about my voice?” John asked in a piercing octane as he moved away from me, checking his dorm mate before griping his shoulder which I noticed seemed so small in his hands. Ban winced from the pressure but still found it within him to return to his onslaught of half-friendly gestures that could too easily turn to conflict.

“You’re o’right, you know? But shit lad, you ought to have said something sooner.”

Ellie removed John’s hand gently. “Is there anything we can do to help going forward?” she asked diplomatically.

“I don’t need help,” John defended, his fingers fidgeting for want of a fight. “I don’t want pity -”

“You’ll not have it,” Ellie told him sharply. “Not from me. But I suppose you haven’t heard that I don’t have a heart.”

“She doesn’t,” Ban verified, stepping in between the two. “She’s a right -”

“I’ve heard your assessment of Miss Hewlett,” John warned sharply. Ban tried to shrug but his face collapsed with the slightest movement of his shoulder. I wondered how badly John had hurt him, if he meant to, if intention was even relevant. The Liverpudlian shook it out. John spoke. “It is not that the sense fails me entirely. I’ve identified my weaknesses and find I am able to work around them in nearly every conceivable instance.” Though in control of his calm, every word sounded like a threat.

I took a step forward. Ban Tarleton was not among my favourites, but that was no reason not to act if need be. I did not want to see him hurt. I did not want to see John Graves Simcoe as the type of person who revelled in aggressions.

“You missed the sex show and you’re missing the scramble,” Ban mocked. I threw up my arms in frustration as somewhere in our periphery smokeless fire faded; the sprits confessed themselves for students struggling to dress quickly.

“Shame, that,” John squinted.

“Often,” Ellie interjected, “what is said and what is meant don’t correlate in the ways we expect. Especially here. I imagine it is possible that you’ve missed that as well. You yourself are smart and well spoken – when you do speak - and while it would be divine if everyone held themselves to your standards, you might do well to understand that they are not easily achieved. You are not better than any of us.”

“I never -” John started.

“You isolate yourself even when surrounded by company,” Ellie accused, blunt but cutting as only she could. “You. Not your physical limitations for what they are. I’m going to make an assumption, and you can tell me if I am close. You worry that you don’t always hear what is being said in lecture when one of our professors has their back to us so to compensate you spend all of your time in the library, attempting to recover what you might have missed. You think all of your friends are dead poets and you think of your classmates in the same way you do characters in novels – but life is more complicated than that, Simcoe. Narratives don’t exist in the real word and you don’t entirely get to choose your ensemble. But you can fight for your role, and you are going to have to slay one hell of a dragon in Effie is playing princess to your tragic hero. Little secret?” she threatened, extending herself on her tiptoes to meet him at eye-level. “You don’t want it to be me. _Don’t you dare hurt my friends, especially when they are trying to offer you help_.”

I felt her fire.

“Told you she is a cunt.”

“No Ban, I’m a queen.”

I heard clapping. ‘ _Danny – stop They’ll hear you!_ ’ the girl hissed. ‘ _So what? Well put, Ellie! That is what I love about you – fight the patriarchy!_ ’ Danny Wessex called out.

_‘Shh!’_

_‘What? They already know we are here and as we were looking for them anyway -’_

_‘Yeah? Well I could have gone without my baby brother -’_

“Charlotte?” Ban choked. “God that’s gross – you. Ugh! No. No. You’ve actually made me ill.”

John snickered. I fought the urge.

“Whole school is looking for you lot,” Charlotte said as she approached, slightly dishevelled with a sly grin.

“I’m telling dad.”

“What? That you disappeared for an entire afternoon? Cover for me, I’ll cover for you. Because shit went down here,” she told us giddily. “And you all have a lot to answer for.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The way the wider Hide and Seek timeline works out, I have not been able to pick my matches and have found myself citing some rather dull fixtures that have taken place over the course of Simcoe’s life. The **Derby della Capitale** was a complete accident, falling a week before Merseyside the same year, but Lazio / Roma is one of the more intense and more interesting politically charged sporting rivalries in Europe. 
> 
> I’ve mentioned before that in the 90s Serie A was where it was at, but having recently been in Scotland, I swear on my life, in the year of our Lord 2017 the pubs were all _still_ showing Italian football which is just bizarre. Can’t quite get my head around that one. But anyway. I have no idea what the Bundesliga game would have been, but as I have a small and familiar audience, you guys are free to imagine HSV faced Freiburg (and your side won! Yay!)
> 
> The title of this chapter is taken from a painting of the same name.
> 
> Happy Christmas and “travel safe.” ;)


	4. Sceptre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charlotte finds base amusement in teenage angst. Ellie attempts to exert her authority over public perception, alienating Effie in the process. Danny injures John’s feelings by casually telling him that he frightens everyone, causing his latest muse questions if she is not a little afraid of him as well. Meanwhile, Fabienne deals with rejection, Eugene’s fears find his sister and Ban demonstrates what he has learned of courtly love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I used to laugh that ‘H+S’ could well be an abbreviation for ‘Hewlett and Simcoe’ during the months upon months the main narrative (and most of its daughters) spent with their sometimes-friendship in focus. It occurred to me recently that I might jokingly expand on the summary by rechristening ‘H’ and ‘S’ as ‘Homicide’ and ‘Soccer’ and with that in mind here is your warning:
> 
>  **Would this be a true Hide and Seek prequel without a rotting corpse?** Nah. No chance. 
> 
> Enjoy!

I did not have to imagine what it was to live without words for John had clear designs on spreading his affliction. On the Spartan side of his shared dorm, silence was created with an absence that seemed starker when contrasted with the chaos that cluttered the opposite wall. Aside from a half-drunken glass of tap water and a number of lent books, I would have had no reason to assume that Ban Tarleton roomed with anyone. John had no true artefacts of the outside world, nothing to stand witness to where he had been or where he hoped to go, to tell a story, to ask, to enlighten or inspire.

His wall was bare.

His bed was made.

Everything was standard issue.

I asked him if he got cold at night, longing for the warmth of the blanket my mother had knitted while she had been pregnant with me when he then answered that he was well provided for by the institution. He had only a thin, forest green fleece with our school’s crest with which to cover his sheets. I thought of each stich in my afghan as a hug my mother would have given me as my aunt had once named them when she bundled me up in their infinity when I had been small, sad, and for reasons I had long since forgotten unable to sleep. Suddenly missing Aunt Margaret and her moments of motherly compassion, I wondered if anyone had ever truly held John at all. I wondered if it was truly worse to have loved and lost. I could not find any evidence of the other Simcoes, whomever they had been. The silence John covered them in felt sacrosanct.

No doubt seeing the shiver feeling its way down my spine, John softly asked if he could offer me a tea, which sounded lovely. His dorm mate kept a water cooker in his trunk, he said, pulling two boxes of Twinings from the same compartment. With no milk or sugar to be had, I elected mint over breakfast.

‘ _Do you normally go through his things?_ ’ I asked, perhaps with more judgement than I may have had he offered anything of himself as freely.

‘ _No, but in the spirt of fairness, having heard a rumour, he recently broke into Sir’s office in search of my disciplinary records. We can take some tea off him._ ’

‘ _Do you think he would have if you …_ ’ I trailed off, afraid to say ‘spoke’, electing instead to my immediate horror to rephrase my question with a far more contentious infinitive, ‘ _What did he hear?_ ’

‘ _That I knew how to break out_ ,’ John replied flatly. I did not know if he had taken offence where none was intended, if he had been alluding to something known widely to everyone but me, if he wished for a privacy I was intruding upon or if I was making too much of his tone. I was upset for reasons that had nothing to do with him, and had been equally inarticulate in that single respect. He had asked me if I wanted to come up when dinner had turned into theatre, and I answered yes, expecting that we would snog. Instead, he asked me if I was upset. It was the setting, I answered, that was especially melancholy. We didn’t kiss. Nothing was extended except for a mug of tea that was not his to give.

‘ _Oh,_ ’ I replied sheepishly.

‘ _I got in trouble … before, for not coming back, but ultimately no action was taken, and the boy I had tried to help sat his exams early so that the disgrace of his flight seem less striking._ ’

His octane rose. All I heard was that he did not want to talk about it. I tried to distract myself, but everywhere my eyes fell was a reminder of Danny’s comment, of the words that had been given to my doubts before a room had robbed me of all others.

I stood. I paced until my tea had grown too strong for my taste and too cold for my tongue. John told me not to worry about the twins. I wasn’t. I was worried that I was alone with my thoughts and that their direction necessitated my reserve.

‘ _He is the most homesick of us all,_ ’ John said when he thought he saw me laughing at the well-worn bundle of plush and velveteen that had likely born a closer resemblance to a bear in better days perched beside Ban’s pillow. It struck me that someone who seemed to approach everything with effortless confidence sought private comfort in a relic. The posters and family photographs coving his wall spoke to the same concept of a boy desperate for familiarity in any form. But Ban had two sisters in attendance and a year prior one of his brothers had bordered here as well. How could this not feel like home? ‘ _I would have never guessed he was so sentimental_ ,’ I returned, before asking of the blank wall that designated John’s side, ‘ _Is there nothing that you miss?_ ’

‘ _Nothing that I am especially keen to remember,_ ’ he answered.

‘ _Wait_ ,’ I told him.

 

* * *

 

The tunnels were twisting, but surprisingly easy to navigate. Stairwells lead only to dormitories, so finding the opposite entrance to the elaborate underground, I climbed up through the cache which I realised I had noticed a hundred times before in the old runner that always seemed to snag in the same spot not far from my door.

To my relief, my roommate had yet to retire from her warfront and the room was mine alone. I felt dirty in her dress – not only for its mud stains – and after slipping it off in favour of something less restrictive, I pulled several finished landscapes and florals from my wall. In choosing as wide of variety of colour pallets as was available, I repossessed a number of pictures I had presented Ellie with on warmer days. What use had she of green meadows when she restricted her spectrum to a single scarlet hue?

I told John upon returning - announcing myself by sliding my sketchbook under his door when I remembered that knocking would do nothing to open it - that he could have whichever paining he chose for his wall. He could have kept the entire abbreviated portfolio, but I was curious which work would speak to him the most. While he examined the examples I had brought along with pleasure, I looked at the books he had taken from the library - all methodically arranged alphabetically and by subject - picking out one on mythology to flip through.

John’s fingers started tapping.

I wondered if he was composing a poem, keeping meter or counting syllables.

I glanced at him, eager to know what had sparked his muse, but his eyes were watching me. ‘ _I was curious what would strike your fancy_ ,’ he smiled, evidently employing the same tactic I sought. ‘ _May I?_ ’

I held the book up for display and a piece of paper fell out which John was quick to grab. He half unfolded it, reading no more than the title to himself before placing it in his backside pocket.

“What is it?” I asked.  

It was not what I expected.

“I hated him,” John answered after doubtlessly debating if such an admission would win him any favours. “I wished so many ills upon him.”  I wondered if he was more afraid of a name or a narrative.

“Who? Ban?” I asked, thinking back to their one-sided skirmish that afternoon. With a bit of disease I added with a shy wink, “I don’t think you are _quite_ as alone as you might.”

“Edmund,” he responded. My heart stopped. He expanded on his abrupt retreat to the sullenness that had overwhelmed the hours since Charlotte had spoken the prince’s name. “Now I just hate that of all of my prayers that was the one that was heard. It isn’t just him, is it? It is the twins suffering, too.”

“Ellie doesn’t suffer anyone or anything,” I scoffed. Flipping through the pages with a sudden unwillingness to speak, I longed for the deafness of the ridged simplicity governing all of John’s possessions save apparently for the poetry hidden in the places that inspired it. I noted in the back cover that John had check out this particular volume six times. Before that, Edmund had had multiple read troughs.

“I wish I agreed,” his fingers continued tapping. “About the twins.”

“I can’t stand her,” I said without affording much thought to consequence or to whatever might have been said between John and Eugene earlier when he had abandoned me to Ellie’s bidding. “Really, I can’t stand her and I don’t have any care or want to understand her.”

John nodded slightly, bit his lip and gave a cold recitation with a mercy his muse did not warrant.

_“Ellie Hew –let(t) your sceptre lay,_

_Let your weapons untested,_

_Let authority,_

_Not contradict order,_

_you’ve just won the fight,_

_Is another war needed,_

_To prove your own might?”_

“Did you just come up with that?” I asked, rather amused at the ad rem.

“I … no. I adapted it. Edmund Hewlett tried to have me expelled. He has been the subject of a lot of my verse since. If I am to be honest, that is one of the less scathing stanzas.”

“Weird how well it fits,” I remarked too quickly.

“No. They say armatures study tactics; professionals study logistics. Edmund was inept. Ellie can be cold but she has supply down to a science.”

“You really do read too much,” I smiled, reaching out for his still trembling fingers.

“Or so I am aware,” he said, weaving his around mine.

“I was half-kidding … it’s … with Ellie, it isn’t what she does; it is how she does it. It is the moments when she reveals that we are not peers in her eyes but rather pawns to boss about,” I said, still smarting from supper.

“There were no casualties,” John shrugged, challenging lightly, “Dare you imagine how black things could have been if the whole student body came back and laughed at Gene’s … assessment of his family situation the way Charlotte did? Just thinking about how I felt when her brother laughed at me, that is … with Gene, valid or otherwise, the poor thing is frightened out of his mind. He doesn’t need to be mocked on top of it.”

“I didn’t think about it like that,” I confessed, not for the first time wondering at how void I could be of basic human sympathies, wondering if the newspaper I inherited was to blame or if I had a deficit of character as damning as many of my future headlines would prove.

Hesitantly, John handed me the folded paper that had fallen from the book’s spine. “It isn’t you. It is them. I understand that better than anyone does. You asked earlier if Edmund and I were ever friends. I am afraid that as with you and Effie, it is a little more complicate than ‘yes’ or ‘no’.”

 

* * *

 

“What happened?” I demanded Charlotte when we returned through the tunnels. She was bright eyed and bubbly by nature, no more so than when she had something to prattle about which she so often seemed to. Where other girls expressed that they did not love drama but rather it loved them, with the eldest in-resident Tarleton the affection was clearly requited on equal basis.

She spoke with her hands, moving them as though they controlled marionettes of the entire ensemble, pulling us all into the narrative with the same invisible sting, regardless as to if we had featured or not. Normally she was a joy to listen to, telling everything as though it were a joke, turning tragedies into comedies with an ease no one else I knew could ever hope to emulate. She always spoke quickly, and if she was not short of breath from the many sports she played for our school, or, as I had recently learned, the sex she was having in its hidden walls, I had the distinct feeling she would be from her pace of speech alone. Still, it seemed she could not come to the point quickly enough for my liking.

“Danny and I were on the train back from reserve duty this morning and we saw Eugene on the train in an absolutely foul state – you all know how he gets.” Her eyes danced over us for affirmation. We nodded in anticipation. “Evidently, this has somehow escaped Fabienne – who, okay everyone brace yourselves for this one,” Charlotte began to laugh.

“Has a crush on my younger brother,” Ellie finished when it seemed the Head Girl found the task too difficult.

Collecting herself, Charlotte continued, “I mean, nothing against either of them it is just so … unexpected. She is so … Little Miss La-de-da and he is just. Well.” She invited us to invent our own adjectives with a slight roll of her eyes. Mine was ‘oblivious’. I can’t speak to the choices any of my companions. “We took the bus up from Central Station –”

“There is a bus?” Ban questioned, more, it seemed, of John.

“Of course there is a fucking bus,” Charlotte said. In the girl’s dormitories, it was easy to imagine she was everyone’s beloved big sister. Her sudden sneer now said otherwise, speaking to blood in every sense. “No one would walk from town all the way to school,” she scoffed. “It is like seven bloody miles.” I took a step back while the siblings exchanged the sort of sentiments no lady would so much dare as to think. As lonely as it could feel at home with Aunt Margaret my only company, there were moments when tea time for two felt far preferable to a melee with ten combatants.

Ban, however, was accustom enough to the strife that rather than respond to his sister directly, he turned to his dorm mate and declared, “I hate you. We’re done.”

“There is a God,” John muttered. Though my feet were sore I shared his snigger.

“What happened?” Charlotte asked.

“This fuck dragged us through the woods to get back up here … _When there was a bus we well could have taken_.”

“You went to York and back by foot?” Danny asked, staring at John in something akin to admiration. “You’re a third year, right?”

“I’m a first, but -”

“How are your grades?”

“Perfect.”

“Perfect,” Danny nodded, repeating a statement as an assessment and in so claiming it as his own. “You have a hell of an endurance, lad. Every considered going out for track and field?”

John looked uncomfortable. The captain looked like he was adjusting his roster.

“Recruit later?” Charlotte suggested with a shove. She abandoned her marionettes to engage in a mime. “Anyway … so Fabie is waiting on the doorstep, looking like she stepped out of a music video, and dramatically greets him – honestly, if she wasn’t in heels I’m sure she would have tried to run into his embrace. I am hanging out in the back watching this all unfold and trying to get my shit together because the Hewlett kid just isn’t having any it. Kind of half greets her with a nod and goes inside. She then darts after them, and I hurried to catch up and find out what the fuss was over but by the time I opened both of them were gone.”

“I was kind of disappointed,” she continued, “but mostly tired and sore from reserves, so I just went back to my dorm and took a shower, planning to take a nap and then catch up on my new favourite live-soap at lunch with everyone else. But when I got out of the shower, Mary-Anne of all people was sitting with Emma on her bed and I was just like ‘ _Oh what up, Bouchard being a bitch again?_ ’ – but no – it gets better,” she promised, taking a deep breath before her canter turned to a sprint. “Apparently, she was absolutely distraught because of something Gene said to her. As you apparently already know, it turns out that she has fancied him all year, so I went to kind of check on her, see how she was holding up. She was ‘trop surexcité’ as I sort of knew she would be, but …”

“But?” I repeated.

“It wasn’t that he rejected her advances or that she had even made them. No. He told her when she asked him how his trip was that Lady Edith – his mum – was trying to kill his brother and that is why he goes home at the weekend and never returns happy. Anyway, as you guys have also probably heard, Eddy took a turn for the worse after a few weeks where it seemed he was improving.”

I looked at Ellie and saw nothing of shock, sorrow or recognition. Charlotte interpreted her lack of expression as evidence that she had had time to sort her emotions over the matter, rather than that she lacked the capacity for them. I felt like crying. Ban swore and John blinked – curiously, the single time it seemed that the eyes I had spent an afternoon escaping into shut themselves, even briefly.  “And I am like thinking,” Charlotte prattled on, “Okay, that can happen, it doesn’t mean that he isn’t on the mend and it certainly doesn’t mean murder, and after I got Fabie to calm down I went looking for Ellie to see if she needed consoling but I couldn’t find her. That is when I got worried. Eugene wasn’t at lunch which is weird in itself, so I told Danny to go check on him and he was told the same story that Fabienne was.”

Ellie muttered something I did not catch. Danny resumed the narrative from his girlfriend. “He seemed quite serious. I went to Ban’s dorm to see if Ellie might be there, but none of you were. So me and the lads began a search. Someone asked one of the girls to help and Fabienne then said that you had all run away to Liverpool. No one believed her, of course, given her recent track record there. No one except for Eugene, who freaked out like no one I have ever seen do, screaming ‘ _my sister said she was running away and you let her?_ ’ Apparently, Edmund asks about John Simcoe all the time, and – well no offence mate, you scare us all.”

“Do I now?” John asked. He sounded injured, but having just seen how quickly his humours could misalign, I feared he might offer the well-meaning Danny Wessex real reason for dread. I cringed when the upperclassman continued, “Gene thought that you might have kidnapped Ellie, trying to take revenge on the family for, I mean … who knows. It is all mental in the strictest sense. Eddy apparently thinks you hate him, but I played under Edmund Hewlett and can attest that he thinks _most people_ hate him so that is really saying nothing. Not sure why you were singled out. Probably just whatever combination of drugs they have him on.”

“Probably,” John concurred, his gaze inviting Danny to cease clapping him on the shoulder as though any familiarity existed between them.

“So we did what we always do when someone goes missing around here and have been searching for hours, trying not to alert the faculty,” Charlotte jumped in.

“By having sex in the corridors?” Ban accused.

“I found you,” Charlotte returned, “what more do you want?”

“Literally anything but that,” her brother hissed.

“Where were you anyway?” she asked.

“Watching Lazio-Roma and then Hamburg and a team they should have beaten.”

“And the Derby?” Danny inquired.

“Roma,” Ban answered.

“Well okay, then you have a crappy afternoon, too,” Charlotte stuck out her tongue, “We’re even.”

“I snogged the waitress for a good while,” Ban winked. “I would call the day a success.”

“You’re vile,” Charlotte spat.

“Now we are even,” Ban told her. Somehow, a hardy round of congratulating followed. While the Scousers sung over their (admittedly enviable) success with the opposite sex, while John, blushing, no doubt recited something more refined to himself, while Danny smiled at the girl who kept a list of songs she wanted played at their wedding on her night stand, while I tried to make sense of it all, Ellie already had. She spoke for the first time since bad news darkened her doomsday black eyes a few minutes closer to midnight.

“John, whatever your feeling for my family may be, do us a favour and go fetch my brother for supper, he needs to think he has fewer enemies and I feel you making any sort of gesture would accomplish that.” She spoke with a chilling calm though her words carried a hint of accusation. I wondered what was said about John in Lauriston Castle and why Ellie had not repeated any of it to me amidst her many encouragements that followed his missive.

“Effie, if you would be so kind as to calm Fabienne and everyone she may have upset, I’ll be in your debt,” she told me dismissively. “Danny, call off the search. Tell your lads we were revising for literature -”

“No one is going to believe that,” Ban objected.

“They needn’t. They can make up their own explanation and you can employ what you learned about poetry and history in class tomorrow so at least the faculty will buy the story. Which I take almost for granted that they will, because no one wants to call anyone’s parents or guardians to admit to having failed the simple task of supervision. Tarletons, I need you guys to make a scene at supper – I need something to distract everyone while I have words with my brother.”

I swallowed my objections, as the two gave their consent after Charlotte hugged Ellie and told her not to worry about Edmund. Sometimes things are hard to sort, we want the stories that serve to define to follow the same structure as those that we indulge in for entertainment. Eugene needed a villain for his brother’s sickness to make sense and glimpsing his mum for one of the first times in his life at Edmund’s bedside cast her as his. She was sorry, she said, that she tried to make light of it, but things would get better.

“How can you know that?” Ellie asked.

“You know what Edmund told me once?” she asked, wrinkling her slightly-too-long, upturned nose in her usual sprightly manner. “Time is linear. Things will get better because we are all traveling in the same direction.”

It made sense to me. I was not sure about my best friend. I don’t think she understood half of what we wanted her too in that moment and those to follow.

At dinner I watched with John, Mary-Anne and Fabienne as Emma and Charlotte debated their brother on the morals he hypocritically espoused, loud enough for all present to know that she had given herself to the boy she had been seeing for three years – which, more than likely, they already knew. Ban surprised me by citing his dorm mate’s courtly aspirations as grounds for his objection, advocating for idolization to outweigh action. ‘ _You know he is a virgin, it is all empty gasconade, everything he does. He just wants to seem as cool as Charlotte and Clayton,_ ’ John whispered to us, which delighted Mary-Anne and caused Fabienne to blush. I smiled for another reason – Danny was smiling proudly to his mates from some team sport or another at another table. In all of the recitation I heard from all three bellicose siblings, not once was his race or their father’s bigoted rhetoric brought up. Charlotte once told me that she had only started going with Danny after her the mayor expressed disapproval at some other chap she had then fancied, wanting to horrify him with an alternative, who, for his part, ended up winning her heart in short order. It had apparently been a nightmare I was happy Danny was not forced to relive. Base (and at once baseless) accusations kept silent if they still existed, I wished the three had settled on some other point of contention for the evening’s entertainment.

I wanted to believe in love. In courtship. In honour.

I did not want to watch the public school power couple publically trivialize their romance, to treat sex as a joint conquest rather than a coming together of two souls. I did not want bloody Ban Tarleton of all unworthy people to champion my opinion – though, to everyone’s credit, twenty minutes into the charade the student body seemed to have forgotten about Fabienne’s failure and Eugene’s paranoia. Given the basis of Ban’s argument, most present could reasonably accept that we had spent the afternoon revising for a test we would not have for at least a month. We were all boring. We were nothing to talk about.

I watched Ellie and Gene whisper between themselves in my periphery, tempted to ask John if he could read lips, but, afraid of a secret he took pains to hide curious as I was at the ones being spoken between the twins, I kept my question to myself for the time being. Gene left the table first and I grabbed at his arm as he walked past, asking with genuine concern if everything was well.

“Fine,” he said without halting.

I looked at John.

“I wish I had his sister’s talents in public relations,” he said sullenly, still stuck in the hall. “It bothers me so to think that I have given anyone here reason to fear me.”

Mary-Anne told him unconvincingly that it was just that he made himself difficult to know. Fabienne launched into a story about her father, making the claim that she feared nothing and no one. _Marche ou crève!_ Embracing the sentiment, I ‘marched’ over to confront the lie that bothered me most.

“Fine,” I repeated to Ellie harshly.

“What is?”

“It is what your brother just told me, what did you tell him?”

“What Edmund evidently told Charlotte at some stage,” she said with a sigh.

“And,” I demanded.

“You forget yourself, Effie,” Ellie replied without interest. “Was it so terrible to calm the daughter of the regiment?”

“You know what?” I accused. “How very dare you.” She blinked. I felt empowered. “No one here owes you any sort of homage. If anything, maybe someone should put you in your place. Ought I really remind you that I own twenty-percent of your daddy’s shares? You can’t do anything without answering to my consent. None of you can. Your privilege doesn’t come from divine right, it comes from my bankers deciding that in the interest of my equally lucrative company – which I own outright – that The Mail shouldn’t publish anything that might hurt your prices – like, for example what a heartless bitch you can be.”

“Do not presume to know my heart, Elizabeth,” she hissed. “And don’t you dare stand before me and claim that you have even for an instant let me forget how very much we all own you and your aunt.”

“What choice do I have? It is not as though you tell me anything except ‘I’m fine. _I’m fine._ _I’m fine. I’m fine_. And now you have Eugene spouting your lies – for the love of God to what end?” With tears in her eyes, Ellie left an untouched salad on the table without giving me an answer.

We were not ‘fine’. I wondered how long it had been since we were. I sat with the salad for some time, wondering what lies would have had to have been told to convince Ellie to eat it; if Ban would have taken the time to construct them if he were not making the case for minne in a voice figuratively borrowed from the troubadour who came to rescue me from my sorrow and self-pity.

John asked me if I wanted to go up to his. I imagined he would kiss me. But then I also imagined his walls would speak to his dimensions rather than solely those of the shared dorm room.

 

* * *

 

We talked about paintings, poetry and pain in ways that only half pertained to us until well past nine, not wanting to arrive at or inspire particular impressions, only realising after far too much time had passed that by hiding behind the creative output of others we were surrendering control. I feared I showed my tendencies toward envy by feigning apathy; John seemed to me lost between bloodlust and brokenness. Catullus came up far more than Calcutta (or wherever he pretended to be from), Poe more than his parents, Bukowski more than whatever horrors he had suffered under Edmund Hewlett’s tumultuous reign over the student body.

Me? I was upfront as ever. Only the day that should have been a date had revealed me for my worst. Ever a gentleman, John offered to walk me back to my dorm. Taking my hand as he led me down the stairwell with the small light of our shared lamp, I was not ready to leave his side. The night made me braver, as darkness often does, and I thought to broach the topic of his dorm mate who had not returned for curfew, surprised by my building concern for the imp and his injured shoulder.

“Did you and Edmund Hewlett get into a fight like that?” I whispered, squeezing John’s hand.

“Like what?”

“Like you and Ban.”

“That wasn’t a fight,” he assured me. I believed him. “He is probably still running around her somewhere, reckoning what sort of trouble he can make when he is next wanting for attention.”

I believed this too, finding more comfort in an explanation that fit my established opinions than I did in the claim that contradicted them. John Graves Simcoe was quiet and chivalrous. He wasn’t meant to be simultaneously crazy and corrosive. Part of me was angry that he had hurt Ban (whom I could otherwise hardly tolerate). Part of me was angry that he had defended Lady Eleanor’s honour (she who clearly had none to speak of.) I questioned if it was he who was the contradiction, or if it was I, so I asked simply, “But you and Edmund?”

“That was a fight. A fight I lost and Edmund won without either of us truly being active combatants. We were just there – in Glasgow together – when order broke down.”

“But now you are here. With me,” I said.

“So I am,” he smiled.

‘Glasgow’ rattled my memory and I could not return it.

A few years ago I had awoke to find Aunt Margaret pacing on the balcony with a cigarette and a shaking hand. She was not a smoker. Nor was she the type of woman to show fear. Thinking like a child does, I ran to get her the blanket from my bed, the one my mother had knitted with thousands of hugs for me. My aunt, I reasoned, could have some too. She looked like she needed them. When I handed it to her however, she began to weep, to apologise to me, to God and to a number of absent individuals who stood as good of a chance as being shareholders as they did saints. This is what happens, she told me, when you take on the Hewletts. This was why though Ellie was ever welcome with us in London, I never went to Scotland without her supervision and we always stayed in hotels and dined in restaurants. It had never struck me as peculiar before – we stayed in hotels everywhere we travelled and mostly ate in restaurants, even at home. I told her this. She shook her head and told me once more how very sorry she was as though she was not speaking to me at all.

I insisted at a volume I would ordinarily have been scolded for what had happened. Aunt Margaret sat down and instructed me to do the same. A few days ago, she said, she put a refugee asylum run from one of the Hewlett’s properties in Sighthill on the cover of The Daily Mail. The night before there had been a shooting at the same address, several left dead, several unaccounted for. This, too, had made the front page. She had just gotten off the phone with someone who had told her that Edmund Hewlett had been at the safe house with a school friend who had not made it back. She would not print this. She would need to insure that none of the other major media outlets did either.

I asked why – was it not our job to tell the news to the semi-literate?

She told me that I had inherited a huge percentage of shares in the parent corporation owned and managed by the northern nobles, something that meant nothing to me at the time. She should not have printed the first story in the first place, she said. I was not to leave the house until she managed to bury the lead. I was not to correspond with Ellie. There was a number of things she decided in a flash that I was suddenly not to do. I had wondered if I was not, in fact, being punished after all for raising my voice. ‘ _No_ ,’ Aunt Margaret told me. ‘ _I am being punished, because I know too well what happens when you take any shots against them and I thought of sales and circulation as opposed to our safety._ ’ With that, I was sent to my room. My aunt lit another fag which made me cough from behind my closed door.

She never smoked again (at least in my presence or periphery) and I never learned what happened in Glasgow, because whatever Aunt Margaret and her staff knew never made it to the printers.

I knew now. There had been a shootout and the boy who had such a beautiful voice in verse was afraid to speak. I heard soft sobs and for a moment thought I was crying until I touched my cheek and found it dry. I looked at John, still smiling at the feeling of my hand in his, oblivious the secrets I left unspoken and the distant cries that gave them sound.

“Can you read lips?” I mouthed. He nodded, eyebrows raised.

“There is something going on ahead.”

He turned off the flashlight and we tiptoed to the corner, hand in hand.

 

* * *

 

My first though was curfew. If Ellie was here, had anyone covered for me when Miss Fowler knocked on our door at eight-thirty? I had covered for Ban, shouting ‘ _O’right yous bastard!_ ’ with my back turned in my closest approximation of his awful accent when Mr. Dickerson had come to see if ‘we’ were both tucked in. But he was here as well, as John had predicted out of hand, his face still twisted in pain, presumably from his earlier altercation.

He was not the one crying, however. Ellie was. She was speaking too in tones too low to make out audibly form a distance. John’s spine straightened and he dropped my hand. Shivering, I then wrapped my arms around myself. Ellie had fallen off a horse when we were five and she had cried then. She wept when Sir had come down hard on her exposed kneecaps but it occurred to me that I had never truly seen her in such anguish. She maintained a measure of composure even with her ice melting into rivers. And then she collapsed.

Ban Tarleton was not her ‘other’ best friend. He was her ‘only’ best friend and as angry as I had been at her forcing us all to tell lies so she could convince Eugene to repeat hers it cut me like a knife to see how easily he embraced her. How she did not move to fight his hand when he moved a stand of hair from her tear-stained face. Ellie, I thought, was more than a little pretty when she took off her armour. Ban pinched her cheek playfully and tried to laugh but it came out as a sob. She hugged him and then they held each other and I heard him promise he would find a way to save us all.

‘ _I shouldn’t … it is not your problem. Its my job and I’ve been … I was doing fine for so long -_ ’ she pleaed.

_‘No, it may not be my problem but it is everyone else’s … its yours and I hate to be the one to disappoint you, Princess, but if you think for an instant I am going to let you -’_

_‘There is nothing you can do!’_

_‘You don’t know that!’_

_‘I know that if I lost you I’d, I’d …’_

Their voices faded back into a buzz.

“We should go,” John whispered to me.

“What is going on between them?” I wondered aloud.

“Between them? Nothing. Elizabeth, we have to go. You’ll stay with me tonight.”

We walked back slowly, John holding me tighter, more protectively than he had before. Minutes and meters passed before he trusted the flashlight again. We were out of the tunnels before he trusted himself to speak.

Back in his room, he offered me a burgundy bathrobe and an oversized shirt that reached to my knees. It read “QPR” which he told me was the club his father had supported.

“Not Everton or Liverpool?”

“No.”

“So there are some questions that you will answer,” I spat, frustrated that he had yet to tell me what was going on. He ignored me, turning to take a throw blanket and an extra pillow from Ban’s bed, which he then laid on the floor in the middle of the room.

“Try and sleep, Effie,” he urged. “My bed is yours for the night.”

I sat down but made no move to turn off the light.

“Shall I tuck you in?” John offered. “Can I make you another cuppa?”

“What were they saying?”

He frowned. “I don’t wish to lie to or deceive you, but there are some things better left unsaid. Will it content you if we leave it there; at least until I’ve had ample time to investigate the matter a bit on my own?”

“No. I hate it. Ellie won’t talk to me. And now because of something she said you won’t talk to me, and I am sorry but what exactly have I done to deserve this?” I begged.

“Alright,” John nodded, taking a seat beside me. “Effie, without my wanting to come across as too terribly intrusive, do you know how your father died?”

“Um.”

“Forgive me, I -”

“No it is fine, I just … no one has ever asked me about it before. He had um … a stoke a few months before I was born. He was a newsman, you know … whiskey, cigars – he was young and otherwise fit but, smoking as much as he did, it increases the risk. So does stress and in our business, there are always impossible deadlines.”

“‘Our’ business?” he intruded into my ramblings.

“I inherited the company after my mum died in childbirth,” I clarified. John nodded slowly.

“You inherited a lot of stocks as well.”

“Oh god,” I realised aloud, “it is all because I made an empty threat – I didn’t mean to upset her so. I just wanted her to talk to me. To listen. To reason, or to give hers. Really, I didn’t -” I tried to explain. “I’ll tell her I am sorry -”

“You needn’t. But it is part of why she finds it difficult to talk to you. Ellie has lived with her Lord uncle for a few years now. She found, not too long before school started, a copy of your father’s autopsy in the Duke’s office, confronted her father about it – apparently, trying to blackmail him to let her move back home. She is terrified of the family’s Edinburgh residence. She wouldn’t say why and cried every time she was asked. Effie … from the conversation that Ellie had with her parents, I think, if I understood correctly, her suspicions were confirmed. Your father did not die of natural causes.”

“You mean they …”

“Yea,” he swallowed. “Yea, that is what I mean,” he was silent for a minute before voicing the thoughts which complied too quickly for my mind to keep up with them. “Their brother had a stroke. Gene thinks it was poison and Ellie, having some credible reason to take his suspicions seriously, felt she had to silence him before he suffered the same fate as your Dad, or Edmund, or maybe something similar to whatever she is being forced to endure in the capital. Hard to say. That is, she wouldn’t say, so … it is all but impossible for me to speculate. Immediately after securing her brother’s safety as she sees it, Ellie took whatever you told her as a threat and now worries she can’t protect you either if you think she is your enemy. She is worried about making things right. She is worried that nothing will ever be enough to avenge the things her family had no right to take,” he paused. “She isn’t wrong.”

I longed for the familiar, for my blanket, for my unanswered questions, for my jealous suspicions and my loneliness. I longed for the comfort I had not realized these things brought me. Feeling myself break in a blank room with a boy I still barely know, I would settle for brand new.

“John, this is not an advance in any way, but if I am to stay in your room, will you hold me until I fall asleep?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that was heavy. Spoiler-y in a small way, too. I might have done well to warn you, but what has passed is past … and oh, I have some historical context for you lovely ladies and gentlemen this turn:
> 
>  **“Watching Lazio-Roma and then Hamburg and a team they should have beaten.”**  
>  This was not an attempt of irony. HSV finished fourth in the table in the 2002/3 season. Not enough is made in the media of the role that poor board management played in the extinction of dinosaurs. (For shame, Aunt Margaret, for shame.)
> 
> Anyway, cheers everyone. Glad we could round out 2017 on such an upbeat.  
> Einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr!


	5. Of the Bedchamber

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Effie realises the rumours and realities she suddenly finds herself centric to require a reaction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hallo zusammen! I admittedly did not expect to return to this narrative quite yet, but as it works out the effects of countering a late afternoon Red Bull with a glass of Riesling failed to conform to my hypothesis. I offer the following conclusion on this ill-fated little chemistry experiment: if your goal is to find rest, I would not recommend it, but if at one in the morning you feel the need to flood yourself with adjectives to describe a world that existed just outside of your conscious memory, do I have a recipe for you … XP
> 
> As with practically everything I pen, this chapter hints at particularly dark themes that will never be directly addressed within _Joust_ specifically. Your trigger warning include Mel Gibson films and graphic descriptions of Axe Body Spray. Cheers then!

There were moments in which I wished I could accept the criticism of tabloids as valid. The public has always been happy to name publications such as that which I sadly inherited an hour into this world as sensationalist, scandal seeking and obscene. In reality, or so I came to find on a Monday in April, my aunt and then-editor published the very sorts of stories people were most keen to invent and believe. What few realise is that they are holding a mirror rather than a rag when they read ignis fatuus. Only a hypocrite would claim they were concerned or even engaged with fact when levelling their own assessments and evaluations of others’ experiences.

I had awaken alone that morning in a setting I initially struggled to recognise. The sun left its glow on my cheeks and glare in my eyes as squinting I sought structure. The paintings hanging over my bed were the same I’d stolen form Ellie’s wall. For a moment, I imagined I had slept late and somewhere in the night, our long standoff had ended. But the sun did not shine upon our dormitories until one or so in the afternoon, something my roommate lamented to the plants she softly sang to when it did not occur to her that anyone was listening. I turned over to find the greenhouse that out shared desk had become in recent months had been replaced by lent volumes of history and literature –alphabetised by subject and author. Where I expected to find my bed, I saw a boy’s – still made, mostly, its pillow and throw blanket on the floor beneath me.

I had slept in John’s room. In his bed. In his shirt. I remembered his arms hesitating around me when I had asked him to hold me until I fell asleep. I remembered the softness of his lips on my forehead as I at last closed my eyes. I remembered why he insisted upon my company and sat up with a jolt. It was shortly after seven and the corridors were abuzz with my fellow boarders in the dorm across the quad. I could not sneak out and hurry through the secret passageway back to my own room. I wanted, suddenly and desperately, far more than my current predicament allowed. I wanted to return to the nightmare from which I had awoken, to run and embrace my best friend when I had seen her collapse under the weight of her tears. I wanted to forget the reason for her fall. I wanted to return to our room, to my familiar, but this at present was no more realistic an option than escaping Ellie’s fears had been the night before.

When I stood up, I found my legs were sore from the hike my friends and I had taken into town and back. Nervously, I approached the bathroom door, knocked once, and turned around to lock it. Upon discovering that I truly was alone, I had every intention of keeping it that way. I felt my own filth, but despite my nerves, this matter I could solve with some measure of ease.

I cannot claim to know what I was expecting to find in the combined shower and water closet, if I awaited abominable, austere, or simply another variation of the Axe Body Spray that canvased and chocked every closed space frequented or occupied by any boy to that era. I inhaled, half expecting to be denied oxygen by the stale remnants of a spray on deodorant with a decent marketing campaign, but the air did not taste of the desperation I anticipated. I turned slowly, suddenly, almost instinctively understanding an adage I would first here in a few days’ time – ‘ _you often have more in common with your enemies than you do with your friends._ ’ Bless Ban Tarleton and the neurosis that clearly claimed him. In spite of all the many problems the morning brought which could not be solved with patrician product, my lips hazarded into a smile.

That morning, I walked into the dining hall feeling like Cinderella showing up to a ball, looking like a carbon copy of one of the prettiest girls I had ever known. Curls which I heretofore thought of as untameable fell into smooth strands the reached down to my lower back. I felt the lack of instant recognition freeing. For a few splendid seconds, I imagined that I could be someone else entirely, that the conflict that defined so much of my character ceased. I was not ‘poor little orphan Effie’; I was not ‘Effie the heiress’ or Elizabeth Gwillim at all. I was a stranger, even to myself, at least until I saw someone I secretly envied, admired and idolized, someone who I was essentially imitating in my short-lived confident stride.

“Shut the fuck up,” Charlotte said when she saw me, her mouth opened in awe. She spoke, I realised, not to me, but rather to the boy beside her looking worse for wear.

“I didn’t -” Ban started.

“I know what you were going to say,” his sister snapped.

“Yea and I needn’t because this proves my point,” he said gesturing vaguely in my direction as I approached.

“Which is?” I asked speaking under my breath, fearing that mouthwash was no substitute for the toothbrush I would need to seek out after gym. He smiled. I felt stripped of all of the illusion I had in effect only stolen from him.

“We were talking about Mel Gibson films being unbelievable -” Ban began.

“This never ends well,” I muttered, sorry to have asked. Neither John nor Ellie was sitting at this table. I looked for an escape.

“No,” Christina agreed. Danny whispered something to David and Mary-Anne as Christina then bid me good morning. Ban continued speaking over us all, gesturing as he did, as people whose command of the common language is not as strong as status might otherwise dictate were want to.

“Right look, here is my critique – you know that one where he hits his head and wakes up hearing what women think? Its bullocks of the highest order.”

“This isn’t about _Braveheart_ or _The Patriot_?” I raised my eyebrows, still scanning the room as clandestinely as possible for a better conversational option for the fifteen minutes we had left to eat – something, I realised, proved rather difficult with nearly everyone’s eyes fixed on me.

“It was about _The Patriot_ but now we are on to everything wrong with _What Women Want_ – both as a film and as a series of base observations,” Charlotte offered as she rolled hers.

“It is the premise, girls are not that complicated. They think they are though but it is always in the self-same ways. It is ‘ _I’m not like the other girls. No one understands me the way that this extremely popular song or poem or book does. My mates just don’t have my depth,_ ’” he mocked in a falsetto, looking at me direct. “And then when they are among company it is even worse. A girl joins up with her friends or classmates or whomever, and I swear on my life her first thought is ‘ _Am I fat?_ ’ and this continues on for Christ knows how long as though it is the sort of thing dependent on garment or that blokes even notice for that matter.”

“We’ve been over this,” Mary-Anne piped in with a slight sass that I inwardly applauded. “Girls dress for girls, not guys.”

“Yea, because if you have any two birds together, regardless of their relationship, after some time they hate each other and expend all of their mental energies on that dull pursuit. Point blank, if you’ve two girls together with one lad, neither is giving him a second thought. It is all, ‘ _she has this one quality I lack, how ever am I to compensate for it?_ ’ and it is all about dumb shit too. Not to call anyone out, but have you any idea how often I’ve heard these lamentations from Ells like that she just can’t bleeding well stand that you and Fabienne have blonde hair and hers is black? And then there is Effie here, walks in with her pretty curls concurred and in sportswear because somewhere over the past day she’s decided that my eldest sister is someone worthy of aspiration.”

“Really?” Marry-Anne smiled, infatuated with the very idea that an aristocrat apparently considered her an object of envy. My heart sank, and not only at having my fairy tale reduced to page twelve’s “Who Wore It Better?” –a contest, mind which I would lose, despite my colouring being slightly better suited to the olive green unisex military-issue tracksuit my accuser had yet to figure out I’d borrowed from the bottom of his trunk. Ban Tarleton - for reasons I struggled no doubt just as much as he did to fathom - was evidently having the sort of conversations with my best friend that I had been denied for months. Couldn’t she and I be jealous of Fabienne and Mary-Anne and immediately feel bad about it together? It was terribly unfair. All of these thoughts played into Ban’s final theory of the female psyche. If there were three girls in a group, he informed us, they would wordlessly decide amongst themselves who the fairest of them all was, causing two to hate the third and she to hate herself, thinking the others shared a deeper bond.

“I subscribe to absolutely all of this,” Danny offered, albeit under his breath.

“Good, then you can ring my dad in the middle of the night and give him another reason to attack the American film industry,” Charlotte stuck out her tongue. Turning to me briefly she began to chastise as I well suppose she had been all morning, “In case you haven’t heard, this dork and his dork roommate broke into Sir’s office last night and all they did was ring my house. Like what the fuck, mate? I’d have called a sex line, delivery service, one of those numbers that can only be reached from other government numbers just to see what happens. Shit, lil’ B ... I believed in you.”

“You’d do no such thing. Ever since you got your acceptance letter you’ve lost your edge,” Ban countered. This was probably true. American universities did not wait on A Levels before opening the application process, Charlotte had an athletic scholarship to Yale and would be in New Haven come the fall. As to keeping up an image I would much sooner regret emulating, I wondered at how quickly an earlier portion of the evening prior had been forgotten, wondering at what else I missed having slept ten minutes longer than usual. I looked between Ban, Charlotte, Mary-Anne, Christina, Danny and his mate David hoping for something to betray them. Finally, I asked by repeating, “You and John snuck off and rang your dad last night?”

“Yea, yea – I was wandering around for what must have been hours looking for an entrance point, finally I went back to my room, woke him – from the floor, mind - and just asked if he could bring me. My dad, he is like – really good at solving problems without even addressing them and I needed his input on something. It is not important,” he shrugged. “He said he’ll have a go at it.”

I bit my lip. John Tarleton had been Mayor of Liverpool for my entire living memory. Everything I knew about his reign had to do with mercantilism and manipulation. I had an idea of what Ban might have confided in him, but no concept of how he could help or that he would have any interest in doing so. Even where the mayor said what he meant, he typically had an altogether contrary motive in line. The most prevalent example that flooded the forefront of my mind was the podium he took against abortion. On the surface, it seemed to coincide with his politics and personal life – he ran on the Tory ticket, had been married for over twenty years, and had seven children with his still-gorgeous wife. He had also inherited a sizeable deficit when he initially took office and was keen to give speeches against the city’s ports being opened to medical tourism for evidently hundreds of women took a ferry from Ireland each month to access legal and affordable reproductive care. The fact that he was outspoken against this practice only increased it, planting the notion in troubled hearts that Liverpool was a place where options were available. It also brought in shipping trade contracts from companies with more conservative outlooks, such as the one run by Ellie’s family and owned -at least in part - by me.

The city housed two major football teams and the mayor publically, almost flamboyantly, supported the less successful of the two, increasing the commercial value of both, compelling people who would otherwise have no interest in the game to visit the stadiums that faced one another, contributing then further to the local economy in terms of tourism and commerce. The city took a parking fee, visitors and would likely need a hotel after a round and a row that would inevitably follow any match at a local pub. This alone brought an estimated four million directly into the treasury, without calculating sales tax on consumer goods. I, someone who could name a total of seven football clubs if I put a great deal of effort into the task, was myself getting ready to visit a place I had no reason to go because of the existence of this particular derby. I hazard to think that even this owed itself, at least on some level, to the mayor’s odd zeal.

Seeing no value in brochures and pamphlets, Mr. Tarleton publicized through provocation, protesting against the portrayal of a long-dead local hero in a film several summers passed (‘ _There is nothing connecting Liverpool to the American War_ ,’ my aunt scoffed after a tour of a shipbuilding museum.) The mayor attacked a statue being erected in Hamburg, Germany in honour of Merseyside’s most famous sons in the press. Did anyone outside of England even know where Liverpool was? I did not think it likely, but they knew The Beatles came from that part of the United Kingdom and poured into a town they could not place because an older relative told them that this was the standard on which all music ought to be measured.

Or because the mayor had in some roundabout way or another.

I had no idea what, if anything, he actually listen to. I knew his son, however, had posters of Britney and Christina hung in his bathroom where he hoped no one would – I stopped as my mind arrived at a humiliating conclusion about the US based blondes in his home décor.   

As my cheeks grew red I saw Mary-Anne’s face fall, “Oh no, did you call your dad because of Ellie and Eugene?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I had spotted Eugene at another table with his friends from orchestra. I had not seen Ellie since dinner the night before. Mary-Anne said that she had stayed the night with the two of them and was currently upstairs with Fabienne. She was ‘fine’. I did not trust it, but I did not say anything. Kate, who had a talent for such things, had apparently covered for us both last night, imitating our accents when it became clear that we were not going to make curfew.

“Wait,” Christina smiled mischievously. I felt the world stop. “Where were you if not with Ellie?”

“It’s not what it looks like -” I started.

“What ‘what’ looks like?” Charlotte teased, leaning in.

“It really isn’t,” Ban said, either sticking up for my honour or fearing that he would suddenly seem less cool than the boy whom no one spoke to. It was always impossible to tell. “Effie fell asleep in my room – in John’s bed – and John slept on the floor. I think they were doing homework or something because a few books were open.”

“That is what happened,” I said quickly. “That’s why I had to style my hair a little bit differently,” turning to Charlotte, I said “It wasn’t because I was trying to copy you, I just – didn’t want anyone to see me sneaking back to my own dorms so early and get _the wrong idea_. He wasn’t there when I took a shower or anything -” I babbled on until the bell rang.

 

* * *

 

By third block, everyone thought that John Graves Simcoe and I had had sex.

And everyone was talking about it.

I had heard that he left the dining hall with a breakfast plate for me. So, evidently, had everyone else. I had not seen him all morning and was worried that the gossip had gotten to him; that our story had ended on its first page. Or, rather, on page twelve, where I unexpectedly found myself the girl of the moment – a stylish someone who lived a scandalous life.

In a ‘reputable’ publication, granted, the story would be that Eugene Hewlett thought his brother had been poisoned, that his sister had evidence that the father I had never known had been killed by the same means and by the same people. I had bigger problems than the assumptions people made about my ‘Creamy Blow Job Conditioner’, the cologne I was wearing and the fact that I had snuck off after running exactly two laps around the track (a personal record) to go back up to my room, brush my teeth and change. I had bigger problems than the fact that Ban had been up all night on nerves and caffeine, that he wasn’t quite as good-looking as people were often so keen to accredit and that the only obvious reason for this anyone could find was that I had been so loud for so long in the bed next to his that he had not gotten a wink of rest. I had bigger problems than the rumours that overwhelmed my character and this left me with no defence to offer my two-hundred or so accusers.

All I could do that morning was dread English, my favourite subject and the only one I shared with John. I had no returned to gym and maths few by as quickly as the notes my classmates passed when our teacher’s back was turned. It hurt me to recognise that I would have participated in this without any question of conscious had the couple in question been another. I had partaken in the whispers of surrounding every name I knew at some point. Sex, I thought, was something private, almost sacred that should not become public domain with such ease. If I stood up and denied it, it would only fan the flames and though far from being puritans, I felt my schoolmates already had me tied to the stake.

John and I met outside of our single shared classroom in what felt like happenstance. He would not meet my eyes as his danced across the faces of the small circle of spectators that had formed around us.

“Effie, I am so deeply sorry. Understand it was never my intent – I should have thought,” he stammered, his voice unsettlingly high.

“It is not as though you went around saying that I … that we …” It was awful. I knew from life in the city that these words were better ignored, but John struggled with social interaction in ways I knew only that I did not fully appreciate. Last Friday, none of these people knew his name or much cared to. I saw his hands were buckled into fists, knuckles white, palms likely red from the pressure of the nails that must have been digging into his skin. “If I find out who started this,” he began. I was scared of the clause I anticipated following the condition.

“No one started it, these things just exist,” I said as if I imagined it to be reassuring. “They will tire of it in no time and things can go back -”

“Miss Gwillim!” Miss Fowler said as she broke in. “Sir wants to see you in his office, post haste.” She looked a bit nervous if I was asked to name the small twist in her brow. Miss Fowler was younger than most of the other teachers at our institution. She was kind hearted, still enthusiastic about the subject she taught and everyone loved her for the unfortunate reason that her gentle nature made her easy to step on. She had never ordered me to do anything even in a second hand manner, and I did not trust that she entirely had the confidence to deliver this message. “John,” she said softly to the student she met at eye level, “could I trouble you to copy your notes for Effie?” Her enunciation was exaggerated without being offensive – by speaking slightly slower, she offered to help without calling unnecessary attention to the problems he had. I smiled weakly and he nodded. We shared a look that said less than the words that went unspoken between us before he turned and walked into lecture.

I missed him as soon as he was gone.

But I had bigger problems. 

 

* * *

 

I was going to be expelled, I told myself. Sir had heard the rumours about me that saturated the air like a sticky, humid fog. I had in a single evening gone form ‘model student’ to ‘insult to the tradition and integrity of this institution’ or however he would chose to frame it. I wondered if I could be court martialled too, being that our school was a project of the Royal Air Force, if I would be flogged for disobedience like characters in the books I read so often were before being returned to my aunt for the far more torturous ‘ _Elizabeth, I am highly disappointed in you_ ’, followed by the always-vague ‘ _Why, if your mother were alive -_ ’

When I entered the office choked up on dread, I found that I would not need to wait for the whip of military discipline. My aunt was already on the phone. Sir lead me into the small side room, unchanged since my last visit in December save for instantly recognisable initials written on the back of the plastic stool I was offered with the receiver. The room still stank of cigars, of cheap tea and corned meats cooked for one on the single-burner stove. Sir closed the door. I was certain he was listening from the other side.

“Hello,” I said. In the second it took my aunt to speak my name I was certain that Edmund Hewlett had died. I imagined hanging up immediately, going back to English and telling the twins the news before they read about it on Wednesday when the papers arrived with our other mail. I began to cry, as much from anger as from sorrow. Had I not given the threat enough merit? Could it have made a difference if we had all left last night and confronted my father’s apparent assailant? Why, I wondered, must it always fall to me to deliver news of the worst sort to people who needed to hear it from someone whom age had instructed on what to say?

“Elizabeth?” Aunt Margret said softly, “I’m sorry it has taken me so long to ring … do you need to come home this weekend? Do you need to come home today?”

“Why?” I sniffed. I already knew. I wanted her to say it. She was in her forties and surely knew better than I how to delicately phrase the answers to the questions hammering away at my heart.

“Elizabeth,” she stammered, “I … I came into the office this morning to a voice message left by one of your little friends. He informed me, well, to borrow his language - that I was the ‘shadiest bitch’ he had ever met and that for reasons he was not exactly clear on, I needed to use my … that I needed to intervene on your behalf because of something that happened last night.”

“Oh God, they called you too? Aunt Margaret, I am so, so sorry. I’m not even friends with that kid he just -”

“I’m not upset, not over that. I’ve been on the phone with his parents for the past two hours or so – they rang me before you ask. Elizabeth, what happened yesterday?”

What hadn’t? I opened the door slightly and seeing no one in the adjacent room, I explained to my aunt as quickly as I could with ‘sorry’ filling places that commas ought that last week a boy had written a lovely poem about my paintings. He roomed with a lad who was trying to normalise Ellie by letting her rant under the pretence that they were talking about some foreign football match or another. In truth, I thought it rather clever. Yesterday (I’m sorry.) we went to a café in York proper (I know how disappointed you must be.) and watched matches from the Italian and German leagues (But John and Ban tricked Ellie into eating some fruit and I’ve been really, really worried about her weight lately. Not that I think that is any excuse, Ma’am.) We came back in time for supper (We were not gone for that long.) and Eugene had come home from Edinburg probably around the time we left (Again, I am so sorry. I know it was wrong.) He was upset, thinking that his brother had been poisoned (Did he die? Is that why you are calling?) Ellie calmed him down but then she and had a set to over it (I know it was rather unladylike of me to behave in such fashion. I’ll apologise to her as well.) Later, I saw her crying and she said, she said –

“What did she say, Elizabeth?”

“To me, nothing,” I told her, sorry for the challenge present in my tone.

Aunt Margret was silent for a long time. “Elizabeth,” she asked in a whisper where I had expected a roar, “How is Eleanor in general, around you and her other classmates?”

I was taken off guard. “I don’t know, I mean, quiet for the most part. She doesn’t eat and she doesn’t like to be touched. I don’t know – sometimes I think that she thinks she is better than everyone else and sometimes, it is more like, she is the saddest person. But every time anyone asks her how she is doing she says she is fine.”

“Umm hmm,” Aunt Margaret hummed to herself. “I imagine this is uncomfortable … Effie, do you remember, before Edmund fell ill, was Ellie then behaving as you describe she does now?”

“I mean … I guess. According to Ban anyway. I don’t really know,” I said. “At first everyone was nervous about being away from home, everyone was awkward so nothing stood out. Why are you asking me this?”

“I’m asking because … Effie I am not quite certain how to put this but I don’t think the twins should be allowed to go home to Scotland. As I said, I was talking to the Tarletons and we agree that we have to come up with a feasible solution ... Would it bother you terribly if Ellie were to stay with you and me for six weeks over the summer?”

I did not understand what she was asking.

“Of course not but – Aunt Margaret, that is not the problem. Is that what you were talking about? Edmund was probably poisoned, and Ellie seems to think my dad -” I choked.

“Elizabeth, I’m going to send a car, we can’t do this over the phone.”

“So it is true?”

The line was silent.

“According to the autopsy your father died of natural causes,” she answered after a short eternity.

“That doesn’t answer my question and I don’t want to come home. My friends need me right now and I need answers and you – I know you know but you are focusing on the wrong issue here -”

Or maybe she was not. Maybe Edmund was safe, Ellie’s parents were in prison and a place that had nothing to do with this war save for some shipping charter had levied some new tax. I assumed in my ire that that was how the world worked and said as much.

“Elizabeth, do not take that tone with me, Miss!” Aunt Margret warned.

“I’m sorry, I am I just -” I stopped. There were things I could not explain to my aunt. I considered myself extremely fortunate that she was not furious that I had snuck off the day before, among others, with a boy I terribly fancied. She could never find out that I had wound up in his bed, or that by leaving I would confirm a series of lies I could not control surrounding what had happened when we were together in his room. If I left on my own for a week or even for a few days, I would come back to find that I had had an abortion. I swallowed, wondering to myself if it would not be a mistake to go to Liverpool at the weekend. Aside from the ordinary trouble I anticipated, would I come back to find that I had been on an Irish pilgrimage of the ironic sort that sought to escape church doctrine?

“I’m not angry, Elizabeth. I’m sorry, I’m so, so, sorry for everything that you kids are facing. If you don’t want to come home, believe me, I can understand. Is there anything I can send you? Something to make you feel more a home?”

Arriving at nothing, I simply told my aunt I loved her and said goodbye.

 

* * *

 

The next hour passed without my notice. I sat for a while in the silence of Sir’s private kitchen until the bell rang inviting us students to lunch.

I found Ellie sitting alone in the dining hall with a plate in front of her that she picked at vaguely.

“John said he took it this morning for you thinking it was a chocolate chip cookie,” she said of the granola and raisin bar that probably tasted like cardboard and genocide. Fabienne had a theory which I freely subscribed to that everything bearing the labels ‘fair trade’ ‘vegan’ and ‘organic’ was a belated colonial uprising, vengeance for centuries of British oppression in the form of something said to be ‘good’ for the consumer. Ellie offered it to me and I raised my hands in protest. “You are braver than me,” I said.

“Yea, he thought you probably would not like it,” she glanced behind her. John was standing next to Danny in the lunch line, no doubt still being pestered about going out for track and field, football, rugby, polo, fencing or whatever sport was in session.

“He won’t let up,” Ellie confirmed. “But I think John is enjoying talking to people who don’t give a damn what the day-comers are saying about … Listen, Effie, about last night – I’m sorry I slept next door and wasn’t able to vouch for you. I wasn’t even angry I just – I was busy with my own shite, and I came back to the dorms slightly before midnight, heard those two still up chatting and didn’t want to wake you -”

“You wouldn’t have,” I said “I really was with John, nothing happened I just -”

“I’m sorry -”

“I’m not angry. Not at you.”

“Well … your hair looks fabulous,” she tried to smile.

“It is called Creamy Blow Job and I feel filthy for using it,” I frowned.

“Because of the name?”

“Because your mate has posters of pop stars hanging above his toilet and I was too tired this morning to register how disgusting -”

“Well, at least we can now be reasonably certain that Ban’s alleged beauty isn’t entirely God given.”

We shared a laugh. When silence resettled and Ellie saw my eyes were still on John, she told me to go over and sit with him and what she informed me was the school’s rugby team. “Or are you avoiding him because -”

“People are going to talk either way. You know how many rumours I’ve heard about you and -”

“Yep,” Ellie winced before forcing another laugh. She was the only person, I realised, who could convincingly imitate a chuckle without smiling.

“I am not avoiding him,” I clarified, “Actually; I wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

I had wanted to tell her that we could not go to the derby at the weekend. I had wanted to confront her over what I had overheard, or rather, what John had read in her lips the night before. Instead, I said sheepishly, “Aunt Margaret wants you to stay with us for the summer holidays.”

Ellie’s eyes fell from mine.

“I – I can’t. I have to go back. Go home. Forever. I’ll probably leave in the next few days. If I am there will be no need for Eugene to make weekly trips home and Edmund will be safe because I know … I know how they like to be amused. My father wants a legacy and my uncle is happy to give him one so long as I … it is not important. I’ll go back. I’ll just go back,” she seemed to say to no one. I felt that she was already too far away to reach.

“Do you want to?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll just go. It is too much of a bother, my being here.”

“To whom?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll write you – I always have, haven’t I?” she demanded, however distantly.

I had to speak up, “I don’ think you should … Ellie, I know what you told Ban last night, and you should know - if you don’t already, that he called his dad and my aunt and no one thinks the solution has anything to do with you or any of your siblings being in that house.”

“He did _what?”_

Ellie’s pale skin lost its limited colouring completely, making her eyes look all the darker by contrast. In her expression, I saw various tapestries of her forefathers and the men they lead into battle. I saw the broadswords they brought into diplomatic negotiations they never meant to engage in with people they never intended to leave. Every Scottish history followed the same pattern; murders that turned to myths, brutal narratives repeated the instant they escaped living memory.

Ellie Hewlett, I realised, had absolutely no concept of what differentiated friend and foe.

And I? Anticipating a claymore, I adjusted my crown. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They say no love is as pure as that between local politics and the casual observer. Intending no personal disrespect to John Tarleton and the office he held in the eighteenth century (but every possible slight to more recent wearers of that chain) all of the politicking cited in Effie’s round up bases itself around the actual news cycle from circa 2000 – 2003. Liverpool to my mind is among the best midsized cities in Europe to look for examples of gross misuse of mayoral time and tenure. Respect. I should however note that while Tarleton was a conservative, the city is currently Labour and was Lib-Dem when this story takes place.
> 
> ‘Creamy Blow Job Conditioner’ does not exist to the extent of my knowledge, but in homage to every British bathroom product I have ever purchased (excluding those from LUSH) Effie’s hair relaxer simply needed a suggestive name.
> 
> I do not believe I have any more context to provide, but I do want to thank Maryassassina again for recommending that I watch _The Patriot_ , which was everything I ever expected it would be in the best possible way. Got to say, I am a bit keener on the film's antagonist than I am on the imp who pops into various H+S narratives now and again, but half of that is our sharing of a syllable. ;)  
> Tavşancık, Tavington - tjaaaa, basically the same word. ... I never find my actual given name in souvenir shops either.


End file.
